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The consideration of sustainability aspects is becoming increasingly important at municipal level in order to implement the SDGs. Some municipalities already have their own concepts for individual SDGs, such as climate protection (SDG 13). There are many fields of action in which municipalities can initiate changes to contribute to the SDGs. An important field of action is the municipal task of planning, building and maintaining urban areas and surfaces sustainably. However, as this topic is quite complex, there is a need for a guide for municipalities on how to conduct such a sustainability assessment. The authors provide a practical guideline for communities to evaluate the sustainability impacts of urban surfaces and their management processes. The guideline has been developed with special focus on its applicability and the reduction of the complexity of the topic for local actors. The authors present the guideline, describe the underlying methods and the five subsequent steps that can be followed by a community in order to conduct a sustainability assessment. First, the scope of the sustainability assessment is defined by classifying the municipal urban surfaces and their management processes and analysing their relevance. Then, the sustainability of the prioritized surface and process is analysed by selecting relevant indicators, identifying the life cycle phases and researching sustainability impacts in the phases for the thematic priorities. For each phase and indicator, relevant municipal areas of action are determined, selected ones further refined and possibilities for their implementation investigated. The guideline operationalizes the sustainability assessment methodology for the management of urban surfaces proposed by Henzler et al. [1], which uses SDG-based indicators and life cycle thinking of LCA, considering the interaction between the life cycle of urban surfaces and their products.

Damage assessment is an important task requested in very different contexts. On the one hand very detailed studies are required for cost benefit analysis, on the other hand vulnerability and risk needs to be evaluated for political decisions and emergency situations (i.e. loss estimation of a large scale flood event). Even though a lot of studies have been performed and a lot of different methods are available by now, it is very difficult to use the results in the decision making process, as many methods are poorly described or are based on very special data, and therefore cannot be compared to each other. The attempt of regional (German federal state level) standardizations based on very detailed object based approaches are shown. Additionally, a European wide data set for asset mapping is described and a set of application examples is given. It is designed to enable users to compare the impact of different types of hazard. To take it one step further, a global map for vulnerability is presented that can be used to set up a monetary based data set if detailed statistical data is not available. Every type of data set and methodology has its special tasks to fulfil but there is also a high demand for harmonisation and comparability between different studies to enable better decision making. The next demand on data sets and methodologies is to perform time sequence analyses, therefore all data sets and methods presented fulfil the requirement of being updated regularly.