A large portion of design activity involves reuse of previous knowledge in order to solve new problems. Therefore, facilitating eco-conscious exploration of archived designs is needed for advancing sustainable product design. It is thus necessary to create integrated exploration tools that share common data representations for design and sustainabilityrelated product metadata. This can allow de...

Microfinance sector has witnessed a burgeoning outreach under microfinance institutions model which poses a question on the sustainability of the programme. Even if repayment rate for the major MFIs are greater than 95 %, it may neither be an appropriate indicator of institutional sustainability nor on impact. In this paper an examination on the outreach and sustainability of microfinance insti...

Numerous efforts around the world are underway to apply the Montreal criteria and indicators to assess the sustainability of temperate and boreal forests. In this paper, we describe a logic-based system for evaluating the sustainability of forests at regional and national levels. We believe that such a system can make evaluation of sustainability more consistent and transparent. This effort als...

Macroeconomic sustainability indicators are often applied at the national level. This national-level focus is problematic given the importance of trade in the global economy. This article uses one measure of economic weak sustainability, Genuine Savings, to highlight three issues: (a) the national-level measure is empirically unsound because it does not provide a reliable indicator of weak sust...

Health information systems (HIS) in their current form are rarely sustainable. In order to sustain our health information systems and with it our health systems, we need to focus on defining and maintaining sustainable Health Information System building blocks or components. These components need to be easily updatable when clinical knowledge (or anything else) changes, easily adaptable when bu...

The article explores on the basis of several definitions of environmental impact assessment, strategic environmental assessment and sustainability impact assessment the needs to develop a new sustainability impact assessment of policies as a framework to focus on the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. By using the example of rural development, indicator lists are d...

Lack of overview of standard requirements; evaluation of the organisation’s status quo and appreciation of possibilities to satisfy society’s expectations are the most important obstacles when the question “Whether to issue a Sustainability Report or not?” should find an answer. This paper bases on Global Reporting Initiative G3.1 performance indicators and UN Global Compact sustainability prin...

INTRODUCTION Nowadays several rating systems exist for the evaluation of the sustainability of buildings, but often their focus is limited to environmental and efficiency aspects. Hospitals are complex constructions in which many variables affect hospital processes. Therefore, a research group has developed a tool for the evaluation of sustainability in healthcare facilities. METHODOLOGY The ...

The notion of environmental space was coined by Hans Opschoor in the early 1990s, referring to a range of limitations in resources available for human consumption. Meanwhile it has been demonstrated that energy, material flows and land use are three essential resources to be taken into account, and that the reduction of their use would significantly contribute to reducing the main stresses for ...

The modern environmental management literature stresses the need for community involvement to identify indicators to monitor progress towards sustainable development and environmental management goals. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of participatory processes on sustainability indicator identification and environmental management in three disparate case studies. The first is ...