Sustainability Assessment Tool

Overview of the tool

The Sustainability Assessment Tool was developed for the Target Zero team at the Christchurch City Council who have very generously made the tool freely available and accessible through the BusinessCare website.

Sustainability is a recent concept and most of us have difficulty understanding what it really means, whether we are working within a business or with business as a BusinessCare coordinator.

If you are working with businesses as a local BusinessCare coordinator, it would be useful to have some idea of where a business is at in terms of sustainability. If you like, putting a stake in the ground that identifies where a business is at one point of time, and then over time assessing what progress toward sustainability has been made by comparing with the initial base line.

It would also be useful to know what areas to look at first. What is the business doing well, what could be improved? Where do you start?

The same applies if you are working within a business to encourage more sustainable business practices. How well do we comply with the law? Do we monitor our level of resource use and waste generation? To what extent is sustainability a part of how we do business? Being able to consolidate answers to these sorts of questions can help decide where best to direct your time and effort.

The Sustainability Assessment Tool does not pretend to provide a definitive answer to any of these questions. As with sustainability, it is a work in progress! But it does give useful feedback that helps us decide where to start.

The tool is in the form of a questionnaire (that generally takes between 20 to 30 minutes to answer) and provides feedback based on a framework for business sustainability developed initially by the Queensland EPA and refined by a joint NZ/Australian working group. (see the Destination Framework).

Progress of a business toward sustainability has been expressed in terms of a journey through a number of destinations that are representative of different aspects of business practice. The destinations are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather to provide some measure of a business's progress. For most businesses, there will be strengths and weaknesses across all the destinations.

Measuring progress is important for both the managers of programmes assisting business with sustainability and the businesses themselves.

The assessed progress score provides a simple quantitative interpretation of a business’s progress by expressing progress as a percentage score of 'actual against possible' for a number of questions calibrated against the five destinations.

A business’s progress depends on both the motivation and knowledge that exists within the organisation. A simple graphic provides feedback on an organisation's relative need for increased awareness and motivation to want to become more sustainable, balanced with the need for knowledge on how to become more sustainable.

The framework is useful for benchmarking where a business is at, and is best used as an internal measure. That is, the tool is best used within a business to indicate whether progress toward sustainability is occurring, rather than as a means of comparison between businesses. This is because it is difficult to ensure consistency of answers between respondents from different businesses.

Please email us with your feedback and we will continue to improve the tool.