River facilities are important infrastructure for a nation. But facing the global warming and climate change problems, it is imperative to increase the sustainability of the facilities in one hand, and to reduce its impacts to the global warming problem on the other hand. This research develops a sustainability appraisal system for river facilities construction during their planning and design phase. The objective is to design a river facility in a more sustainable fashion. Literature reviews and synthesis, expert interviews, and group discussions with the design engineers are conducted to develop the sustainability appraisal system. The appraisal system consists of 8 index categories, namely the efficiency, ecology, safety, energy conservation, waste reduction, durability, humanities and culture, and creativity. Under the 8 categories there are 20 subcategories and totally 34 evaluation items. The developed appraisal system is tested on 20 river facility construction projects for sustainability evaluation of their design. The initial results demonstrate the system's capability to differentiate the river facility projects for their sustainability. Also, the testing reveals the system's operability and applicability. The system development, framework, and the testing results and analysis are reported in this paper.