Sustainability Impacts

A fundamental concept of sustainability includes three pillars: environment, economy, and society. The impact assessments of sustainability need to incorporate all three dimensions to better understand the performances of a process, product, or a system on environmental, economic, and social aspects. An integrated sustainability model (ISM) can be considered as a transdisciplinary and participatory process that combines and connects knowledge from diverse scientific domains.

The ISM uses system dynamics to build complex interactions between key variables in order to capture the dynamic changes of environmental, economic, and social impacts. Our team in the LSM have applied the ISM to bioenergy systems to estimate their sustainability performance in terms of significant indicators of environment, economy, and society. The ISM can assist stakeholders and policy makers in decision making and strategic planning by providing comprehensive insights on the sustainable development of a bioenergy system.