Basic Sustainability Assessment Tool (BSAT)

BSAT is a comprehensive, generic sustainability self-assessment tool. It can be used by any-size organization, in any sector, in any country. It may be especially helpful for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and large organizations with minimal / no sustainability staff. It uses less than 20 multiple-choice questions to score the organization’s sustainability performance.  It also suggests over two dozen actions that improve its performance on GHG emissions reduction, the urgent issue that most stakeholders prioritize. 

This tool expresses an organization’s sustainability performance in three ways:

1. As scores on progress toward science-based goals for core sustainability issues that arise at the organization’s impact points on people and planet.
2. As scores on contributions to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
3. As scores on impacts on the 3 non-financial capitals (natural, human, and social).

Organizations can express their sustainability scores in whichever framework’s terminology is most appropriate for their purposes.  That is why the tool was previously called the “3-in-1 Sustainability Assessment Toolkit.”

The free Excel version of the tool is downloadable here. It is an open-source tool, so feel free to tailor it to better suit your purposes, translate it into other languages, change question weightings, change scoring formulas, use it as a base for an online app, integrate elements of it into your current tools, etc.

Note: Do not try to use this Excel workbook in Google Sheets. Unfortunately, all checkboxes are stripped out by Google Sheets, so formatting and many calculations won’t work.