Sustainability and Remediation - Dealing with Contaminated Sites: From Theory Towards Practical Application - page 913

“headline” encompasses a range of related individual indicators. The SuRF-UK
review (CL:AIRE 2009 ) did not identify an indicator set that could already be used
unaltered for sustainability appraisal for remediation.
It had been suggested during SuRF-UK and NICOLE meetings that the GRI
indicator sets discussed in Section 20.2.1.2 (Table 20.2 ) could be considered for use
in contaminated land management sustainability appraisal, as they are a compre-
hensive internationally agreed indicator set already in use for corporate reporting.
However, even the GRI set is incomplete for remediation appraisal. For example,
they do not consider soil and geotechnical functionality, landscape, the built envi-
ronment and protection of archaeological artefacts. These international indicator
sets may also include factors that may well be seen as irrelevant for a remediation
project, e.g. “Education - Education Level - Children Reaching Grade 5 of Primary
Education” and “Adult Secondary Education Achievement Level” from the 2001
UN indicator set. The SuRF-UK initiative is currently considering the need for and
possible contents of a checklist of indicators for the consistent reporting and assess-
ment of sustainability for remediation, based on earlier work which suggested a
range of environmental indicators (Environment Agency 2000 ).
Two other recent UK reports have reviewed in excess of 100 individual sus-
tainability appraisal tools from a wide range of developers and suppliers (Building
Research Establishment 2004 ; Therivel 2004 ). None of these tools had a holistic
coverage of the scope of sustainable development. Therefore, there is perhaps a
need for further development to focus on more holistic appraisals.
An emerging concern is that the wide scope of sustainable development themes
will result in an unmanageably large number of individual indicator assessments that
will lead to expensive and unattractive sustainability appraisal approaches. There are
two possible approaches to deal with this problem. The first is to make some kind
of selection of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The second is to structure the
consideration of indicators in a hierarchy, and use this as a means of simplifying
assessments.
20.3.1.1 Using an Indicator Hierarchy
A hierarchy structures indicators in a way that reflects their inherent relationships.
This type of hierarchical approach is also consistent with the tiered approach dis-
cussed in Section 20.2.3 . For example, environmental indicators could be structured
as set out in Fig. 20.8 . A simple sustainability appraisal might simply be based on
a solicitation of stakeholders views of the key environmental, economic and social
impacts of particular remediation options as routinely happens under the English
planning system. This might be perfectly adequate for small remediation projects
in less contentious areas, where the decision level is solely connected with remedy
selection. The next tier might be to base a sustainability appraisal on a qualitative
assessment of “headline” indicators which incorporate a range of individual indica-
tors. For example, Table 20.4 provides 18 such headlines. This type of qualitative
appraisal may be sufficient. If it does not provide a clear decision making rationale,