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This study aimed to identify research trends and topics in sustainability assessment in the food sector within the scope of economics, business and management research.

The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis by applying a rigid and systematic research protocol, employing bibliometric techniques and a keyword co-occurrence network. Further, the Visualization of Similarities viewer software was used to analyse publications between 1994 and 2021.

The knowledge trends regarding “sustainability assessment” in the research area of business economics demonstrated a notable evolution of the topics analysed, ranging from indicators and policy analyses in agriculture and fishery sectors, to the topic of sustainability life cycle assessment (LCA) and management systems. In business and management research areas, the main theoretical frameworks used for sustainability assessment in the food sector included the triple-bottom line (TBL) and the LCA, and the main research topics were food chain logistics, bio-based products, retailers, consumption patterns and crop-based biodiesel options.

This study employed only the WoS database and future studies could incorporate other scientific databases. Regarding future research, more emphasis could be laid on food retailers given their prevalence as demonstrated by the study and past research.

The findings can help all participants in the food global value chain to make better decisions to guide their sustainability efforts and assessment. Moreover, this research reveals that companies need to be actively engaged with their stakeholders and pay special attention to consumer patterns and perceptions.

The bibliometric research focus on business and management research areas using the Web of Sciences categories, starting from the research area of business economics to the analysis of the food sector's sustainability assessment.

Existing performance assessment frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), struggle to incorporate diverse voices and representations of heterogeneous contexts. Cities, in particular, present a challenging context for sustainability performance assessment as they pursue new forms of governance based on the multiplicity of actors and inter-organisational collaboration. This study explores how sustainability performance accounts are created at the urban level within collaborative forms of governance and amidst the plethora of available devices for performance assessment.

This study adopts a case study approach. Qualitative methods are mobilised to study a large European project focused on the urban transition to a circular economy in six participating cities. The construction of sustainability performance accounts is studied via the Actor-Network Theory lens.

The study highlights that when it comes to sustainability assessment in city initiatives, existing performance assessment devices are adapted and modified to fit local needs and other sources of performance information are spontaneously mobilised to address the different dimensions of sustainability.

This study contributes to the public sector accounting literature by explaining the process of modifying existing devices for performance assessment to allow for the co-creation of accounts and by illuminating the spontaneous way in which performance information is generated and combined.

Businesses are increasingly vulnerable and exposed to physical climate change risks, which can cascade through local, national and international supply chains. Currently, few methodologies can capture how physical risks impact businesses via the supply chains, yet outside the business literature, methodologies such as sustainability assessments can assess cascading impacts.

Adopting a scoping review framework by Arksey and O'Malley (2005) and the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR), this paper reviews 27 articles that assess climate risk in supply chains.

The literature on supply chain risks of climate change using quantitative techniques is limited. Our review confirms that no research adopts sustainability assessment methods to assess climate risk at a business-level.

Alongside the need to quantify physical risks to businesses is the growing awareness that climate change impacts traverse global supply chains. We review the state of the literature on methodological approaches and identify the opportunities for researchers to use sustainability assessment methods to assess climate risk in the supply chains of an individual business.

The agri-food industry is experiencing a revolutionary shift due to the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies to improve efficiency, transparency and sustainability. The importance of agri-food supply chains (AFSC) in promoting sustainability is expanding as the globe struggles with issues including resource scarcity, climate change and population growth. In order to better understand how Industry 4.0 might improve sustainability in a world that is changing quickly, this work aims to focus on identifying various sustainability assessment factors influencing AFSC to increase overall sustainability, minimize resource consumption, cut waste and streamline operations.

Important sustainability assessment factors are identified from the past academic literature and are then validated using the fuzzy-Delphi method. A method called decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is used to examine and analyze structural models with complex causal linkages. The results are then validated using sensitivity analysis.

The factors that emerged as the highest ranked for evaluating the sustainability of Industry 4.0 in AFSC are market competitiveness, and knowledge and skill development, followed by resource efficiency. Industry 4.0 technologies are essential for increasing the marketability of agricultural products because of the major implications of market competitiveness. The significance of knowledge and skill development draws attention to Industry 4.0’s contribution to the promotion of chances for farmers and agricultural employees to increase their capability.

By outlining the nexus between Industry 4.0 technologies and sustainability, the study presents a comprehensive framework that would be relevant for researchers, policymakers and industry stakeholders who want to leverage Industry 4.0 technology to build more sustainable AFSC in the future. The study findings can help the farmers or producers make sensible choices that adhere to sustainability standards and guarantee long-term financial viability.

The originality of this work lies in the identification of sustainability assessment factors especially for AFSC in the era of digitalization which has not been discussed previously.

Purpose: Urban centres have been argued to be crucial in the battle for sustainability. With more than half of the global population presently living in cities, the sustainability challenges of global warming, environmental degradation, social inequality, and economic recessions have continued to thrive. To this end, there have been efforts to revive and improve the existing physical and social structure of cities in a process known as urban regeneration. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of sustainability assessment frameworks in urban regeneration.

Approach: Aligning with the positivism philosophical position, and using document analysis as a data collection method, the study discusses the state of the art of urban regeneration and its application in recent times. The study also reviewed selected neighbourhood sustainability assessment frameworks as a tool for decision-making towards sustainability to know the extent in which they capture the goals of urban regeneration.

Findings: Findings showed that the uptake of the sustainability assessment frameworks could play a role in enhancing integration of local context, social wellbeing and economic prosperity, environmental quality, and stakeholder engagement at the neighbourhood level which are the main aspects of urban regeneration.

Theoretical and practical implications: In theory, this paper establishes the assumption that with some revisions, sustainability assessment frameworks could serve as a tool for decision-making in urban regeneration process. Practise-wise, urban regeneration at the neighbourhood level can now be measured against sustainability benchmarks and indicators.

This paper aims to contribute to existing academic work and business practice by presenting original empirical findings and by providing insights into priority setting on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in organizations. From an academic viewpoint, it not only adds to previous work on the topic of SDG materiality (e.g. Van Tulder and Lucht, 2019) but also aims to contribute new insights into the steps that are crucial and influence the adoption of the SDGs in materiality assessments. It may also add to the literature by providing new knowledge on the strategic considerations that organizations may make and institutional dynamics that encourage organizations to implement the SDG materiality method.

By executing a national survey research in Belgium through a collaboration between academics of Antwerp Management School, Louvain School of Management (UCLouvain) and the University of Antwerp, and supported by Belgium’s Federal Institute of Sustainable Development, the authors have obtained several insights into the SDG landscape in Belgium for various types of organizations, including companies, governmental and nongovernmental organizations and educational institutions. This research builds further on a first national survey (SDG Barometer Belgium, 2018) on the adoption and implementation of the SDGs. However, an important aim of this research is to shift the emphasis to more prominent new elements, such as whether or not organizations use the SDGs in materiality assessments. While the main part of the data for this research were collected through an online questionnaire, document analyses were conducted based on the sustainability reports of BEL 20 companies, the benchmark stock market index of Euronext Brussels consisting of 20 companies traded at the Brussels Stock Exchange, and seven interviews were held to obtain additional insights.

A total of 386 organizations across sectors responded to the question “Does your organization perform a materiality analysis”, of which 210 organizations completed the question “Does your organization align the materiality analysis with the SDGs,”after an “exit route” based on a positive answer to the first question. When diving into the survey results, the authors see that no more than 12% of the 210 organizations performing a materiality analysis align their materiality analysis with the SDGs, while 14% indicate that they do not account for the SDGs at all in their materiality analyses. The results show that 41% of the organizations take into account the SDGs to a certain degree when performing their materiality analysis. Speculating on an explanation for these results, it may be the case that organizations do not yet think about coupling the SDGs to their materiality assessment, experience difficulties in practice or generally lack the knowledge for relating the SDGs to the sustainability topics that are relevant to them. This seems in line with other research (e.g. Van Tulder and Lucht, 2019), as the results of this study indicate that it seems to be difficult for organizations to relate the SDGs to the existing sustainability priorities or materiality analyses of companies.

The real contribution of this paper essentially lies in the description of the Janssen Pharmaceuticals case. The company recognized that today’s internally focused approach to goal setting is not enough to address global challenges. Hence, looking at what is needed externally from a global perspective, taking into account sustainability thresholds and setting ambitions accordingly, is needed to bridge the gap between current performance and required performance. From the Janssen Pharmaceuticals case, the authors learned that external stakeholders are an extremely useful source of information to address the required performance by using the SDG framework. For sure, SDG materiality analyses are still in an early phase of development and knowledge on how to conduct such an analysis may be lacking. Future efforts – or the lack thereof – may indicate whether or not companies consider such analyses as sufficiently relevant. Although the uptake of the SDGs is in progress, it remains to be seen which, if any, materiality method will eventually turn out as a new dominant way of defining material issues. The findings presented in this study hopefully serve as a basis for further investigation of the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to review and provide propositions about survey assessment tools of the key sustainability competencies (KSCs) of education for sustainability. UNESCO points out how education plays an important role in transforming societies towards a sustainable future and achieving the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. To plan education for sustainability, teachers need to know the students’ competencies for sustainability before they come to class. Thus, a formative assessment about student competence for sustainability is needed.

Firstly, a structured literature review of assessment tools used to measure sustainability competencies by questionnaire survey is presented. Secondly, the authors’ conceptualise how the competencies influence each other and provide propositions for future research.

The literature demonstrates that there is much ambiguity between prior research about the scales used and what they represent. A lack of validation across disciplines is apparent and an assessment tool that includes all eight KSCs could benefit education for sustainability. Future research could investigate how the competencies influence each other and which drivers are stronger for each discipline across different countries. A formative assessment tool can address this need.

The findings provide a new analysis about questionnaire assessment tools used in prior research to measure sustainability competence. The authors’ offer a discussion about the strengths and weaknesses found in prior research and propose suggestions for future research. Their conceptualisation also provides propositions for validating the KSCs presented in a recent framework.

Megaprojects are large-scale and long-term investments. Three pillars of sustainable construction objectives, namely, social, environmental and economic, should be integrated into megaproject risk management to ensure long-term success. A risk assessment method, Risk Assessment Method for Sustainable Construction Objectives in Megaprojects (RAMSCOM), was developed for this purpose.

RAMSCOM was developed based on the latest concepts and identifying relevant and critical sustainability objectives and risks through an extensive literature review. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Cross-Impact Analysis (CIA) were used to determine and quantify the threats regarding the importance of the sustainability objectives. The applicability of RAMSCOM was demonstrated on a real megaproject.

The findings revealed that sustainability risk assessment requires integration of economic, environmental, social objectives and analysis of cross-impacts of risk factors. Visualization of interrelated threats, vulnerabilities and objectives has a potential to support risk mitigation decisions to achieve sustainability goals.

The method has been developed based on the findings from a detailed literature survey on sustainability objectives and risks. RAMSCOM was tested on a single project with the assistance of three experts' views. Findings from the case project cannot be directly generalised for various megaprojects considering the unique nature of megaprojects.

Decision-makers can use RAMSCOM to assess sustainability risks in megaprojects and develop risk management plans for the most vulnerable and important sustainable objectives in a visual and quantified approach to ensure megaproject's sustainability in the long-term.

The theoretical contribution is a novel risk assessment method that integrates all dimensions of sustainability and quantifies the vulnerability of sustainability objectives considering their priorities, interrelations and risks. Sustainability dimensions, objectives and risks used in RAMSCOM can be useful for other researchers aiming to develop similar methods.

This paper bridges the gap between the theory and practice by developing a life cycle sustainability tracker (LCST). The study is seeking to proffer solutions to an observed shortcoming of conventional life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) communication platforms. Notably, the static nature of the information provided on such platforms has made it difficult for them to be used for real-time decision-making and predictions. The main aim of this paper is to develop a LCST that facilitates a dynamic visualisation of life cycle sustainability results and allows for an integrated benchmark across the dimensions of sustainability.

The study leverages the model development capabilities of the design science research strategy in accomplishing a dynamic and novel communication platform. A life cycle thinking methodology and appropriate multicriteria decision approach (MCDA) is applied to accomplish a comprehensive, streamlined and replicable approach in mapping and tracking the progress of sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) projects in India.

It was found that: (1) The use of the LCST tracker provides a dynamic and holistic insight into the key LCSA indicators with clearly defined benchmarks to assess the impact on the SDG 11, (2) The NIP projects achieve an upward trend across all the regions, and the percentage of opportunities ranges from 11 to 24%, with the South experiencing the highest growth and the North having the minimal increase in percentage and (3) The assessment score (52–58%) provides performance metrics that align well with the LCST – which ranges between “Fair” and “Average” for all the regions in India.

The novelty of this research is that the LCST provides a transparent and harmonised approach to reporting on the LCSA results. The LCST utilises heat maps and radial mapping to achieve an intuitive display of large amounts of highly heterogeneous data, thus allowing the synthesis of large sets of information compactly and with coherence. Progress towards the SDGs change on a yearly basis; hence, a dynamic LCSA tool provides a timely and the valuable context to map and track performance across different regions and contexts.

System dynamics has several applications in the built environment, and few studies indicate that it has potential in evaluating sustainability. Sustainability in the built environment involves numerous entities and multiple trade-offs. Hence, a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) method is ideal for promoting sustainability-based decision-making in the built environment. Therefore, this study integrates system dynamics with an MCDM method to enable the sustainability assessment by capturing the time-induced dynamic changes affecting long time sustainability performance of buildings.

Conventional sustainability assessment tools in the built environment lack a comprehensive evaluation that balances the needs of the society, economy and environment. This study develops a system dynamics-based framework to enable sustainability-conscious decision-making and policy analysis in the built environment.

Various material, technology and water-related policies specific to the buildings are investigated for a case study building. It is found that the effect of penetration of renewable energy technology to the tune of 80% and above in the energy mix is a much superior policy in sustainability improvement in comparison to material and water-related policies. The study also demonstrates the effect of weights assigned for the different indicators on sustainability-based decisions.

The study provides a methodological framework for a sustainability-based decision support system for the built environment that enables dynamic performance evaluation by coupling system dynamics with the MCDM. This coupling further strengthens system dynamics as a decision-making and policy analysis for sustainability evaluation in the built environment.