“…Approaches to sustainability assessment include multicriteria analysis (Kain & Söderberg, 2008), indicators and indices, life cycle assessment, and integrated methods including conceptual modeling, systems modeling, and scenario modeling (Ness et al., 2007) which can incorporate complex interactions such as trade‐offs, uncertainty, feedbacks, and pluralism (Bond et al., 2012). In the era of the SDGs, global and national ex ante sustainability assessment is often performed through integrated assessment modeling of scenarios (Allen et al., 2017; Moallemi et al., 2022; Soergel et al., 2021), although the models and scenarios currently used for this are not without their limitations (Moallemi et al., 2022; Soergel et al., 2021). These ex ante approaches are rarely used at the local scale for many reasons including the challenge of understanding heterogeneities on the ground (van Soest et al., 2019), the difficulty of customizing complex models for local case studies (Verburg et al., 2016), and a (misguided) sense that the impact at the local scale is less of a concern (Easterling, 1997).…”