An overview of sustainability assessment methodologies

Sustainability indicators and composite index are gaining lot of importance and increasingly recognized as a powerful tool for policy making and public communication in providing information on countries and corporate performance in fields such as environment, economic, social, or technological improvement. By conceptualizing phenomena and highlighting trends, sustainability indicators simplify, quantify, analyze and communicate the complex and complicated information. There are number of initiatives exist on indicators and frameworks for sustainable development. This article provides an overview various sustainability indices applied in sustainability domain. The paper also compiles the information related to sustainability indices formulation strategy, scaling, normalization, weighting and aggregation methodology. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.