A Novel Methodology for the Sustainability Impact Assessment of New Technologies

Abstract

The introduction of new technologies can have profound impact on society and nature. Therefore, a need exists for a method that can provide a balanced assessment of new tech-nologies that takes into account all different impacts. Within the EU-funded PROSUITE pro-ject, the aim is to develop a methodology for the sustainability assessment of existing and emerging technologies. Here, existing approaches of sustainability assessment are re-viewed. All of them have their merits, but none of them is applicable in a generic way to all aspects of sustainability for a technology. Using concepts developed initially for environ-mental life cycle assessment, we propose an approach consisting of the following major impact categories: 1) impact on human health; 2) impact on social well-being; 3) impact on prosperity; 4) impact on natural environment; 5) impact on exhaustible resources. All pri-mary impacts can be grouped under these categories. For several of these categories still quite some analysis of mechanisms in the cause-effect chain is necessary and there will be substantial remaining uncertainties for the others. For a complete assessment, the five major impact categories need to be integrated. Several approaches are available for this purpose, such as multicriteria analysis with or without weighted aggregation.