A new conceptual hierarchy for identifying environmental sustainability metrics

Abstract Metric identification has received growing attention as more alternatives become available for quantifying the sustainability‐oriented performance of a target human activity. Failure to tackle the diversity in these alternatives has given rise to significant difficulties in comparing and interpreting the assessment results obtained from using various metrics. This paper explores some bottlenecks in identifying “appropriate” environmental sustainability metrics that specifically meet the needs of a sustainability assessor. A new conceptual hierarchy “stressor–status–effect–integrality–well‐being” (SSEIW) for metric classification is proposed. This hierarchy categorizes the full range of metrics into five levels, each of which measures the interested environmental outcomes in a different manner. This paper shows that the proposed hierarchy can be applied within the framework of life‐cycle assessment (LCA), which provides a promising solution to “best‐practice” metric identification as well as expanding the LCA applications to the sustainability field. © 2004 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 2004