Abstract

Sustainability assessments are crucial for sustainability-focused decisions. The variety of assessment approaches and situations is highly diverse. Approach selection is vital as not every assessment approach is suitable to every assessment situation. Unsuited selection leads to incomprehensive or unusable results. Systematization criteria and frameworks facilitate approach selection. Existing concepts commonly focus on the supply-side, i.e., available approaches, without considering the demand-side, i.e., assessment situations. This work’s goal is to develop quantifiable spectra and specifications for systematization criteria to describe assessment approaches and match them to assessment situations. For that, systematization criteria and requirements for sustainability assessment approaches are linked and a spectrum and specifications for each criterion are developed. This facilitates a systematic, quantified description, comparison and selection of sustainability assessment approaches.