A sustainability assessment (SA) serves to gauge the impacts of an initiative or a concrete situation from the standpoint of sustainable development. It is therefore a key tool for implementing sustainable development.
How can we assess whether laws, action plans or projects have in fact been given the right orientation?
A sustainability assessment makes it possible to verify at an early stage whether an initiative is consistent with the goals of sustainable development. This entails systematically recording and transparently laying out the positive and negative impacts that may be expected from the initiative on the dimensions of environment, society and economy, and on the subject areas relating to these three dimensions.
Various evaluation instruments are available at the federal, cantonal and municipal levels for this purpose.