Avoiding sustainability trade-offs in environmental assessment

Progress towards sustainability requires positive steps to meet all of the interdependent core requirements for sustainability – including biophysical system integrity and basic human well-being. Where these essentials are involved trade-offs should be avoided, unless all other options are worse. In environmental assessments, it is useful to identify major trade-offs and minimize them through selection of less bad alternatives or addition of mitigations or offsets. However, the more promising approach starts earlier and encourages planning that avoids invidious trade-offs, including through re-consideration of the initial purposes and alternatives. This paper considers two historical cases of assessments that avoided significant trade-offs through processes that gave mandatory attention to purposes and alternatives, covered the full suite of sustainability considerations, empowered citizen participants and facilitated the bumping of cases up to a more strategic level where broader alternatives offered better trade-off avoidance. These long-advocated assessment design elements are still rarely applied as a full package in existing environmental assessment law and practice. Commitment to trade-off avoidance adds to the reasons for their general adoption.