Towards an Integrated Approach for Assessing Triple Bottom Line in the Built Environment

Triple bottom-line, ie environment, society and economy is widely recognised as the main underlying principles of sustainable development. Nevertheless, they are not treated equally in the pursuit of sustainability goals. In addition to imbalance development, the three dimensions are sometimes found to contradict each other in achieving the sustainability goals. Existing approaches tend to make individual assessments on either environmental footprints, social equity or economic development. Therefore, these approaches fail to offer “a complete picture” in assessing the overall implications of all the three pillars of sustainability. This paper examines prevailing definitions, perceptions, principles of sustainability assessment and proposes a life cycle based model to put forward the integration of the three dimensions of sustainability into assessment. The main principles of developing a life cycle sustainability approach are identified. By considering environmental loads and social issues alongside the economic development, different types of impacts should be consolidated to a single framework. This would give convergence of separate schools of environmental, social and economic assessments and leads to better under-standing of potential escalation effects of the sustainability dimensions. More efforts are required to further develop and improve the integrated assessment in both methodological and practical aspects to guarantee a holistic application of sustainability in the built environment.