ABSTRACT
Environmental assessment has been an integral component of resource management and related panning activities for well over a decades. Environmental sustainability as an outcome of a decision process presents significant challenges to the assessment process. This chapter explores those challenges and examines the approaches available to guide the assessment of environmental sustainability. Assessing progress toward the goal of environmental sustainability implies an ability to ascertain the environmental consequences of specific policies or proposals in relation to the environmental systems and its capacity to support changing conditions. Impact on the environment and optimality of choice, together with a collection of evaluative criteria, provide a framework to guide judgment and decision-making. With respect to sequence, impacts to the environmental system may be characterized as primary or secondary. This distinction is useful when considering how an alteration may transmit through the landscape and present differential effects over time.
