Sustainability assessment of investments based on a multiple criteria methodological framework

Abstract

The assessment of an investment is currently carried out by using mainly financial tools. This work presents a new model for the assessment of the sustainability of an industrial investment and focuses on the development of a holistic framework with the use of indicators. With the use of multi-criteria decision analysis, the framework evaluates a total of eighteen (18) alternative indicators in order to select the optimal bundle to be used for the assessment of future industrial investments. The proposed indicators are selected based on relevant data from the literature, taking into account the principles of prevention, planning and designing. The alternatives are assessed over four (4) criteria, namely environment, society, economy and technology, which are grounded on the principles of sustainable development. Depending on the special characteristics of the programme that is foreseen to fund the potential investments, the decision-maker is provided with a hierarchized set of indicators over which the alternative investments could be optimally assessed in parallel with widely used indicators that strictly assess economic performance. In the present work, twelve (12) different scenarios are examined, incorporating different values in the coefficients of the criteria. For the majority of the scenarios examined (a sensitivity analysis is also provided), the alternative indicator that is assessed with the highest score is "Resource Savings", followed by "Recycling" and "Research, Innovation, Development".