An Interdisciplinary Systematic Review on Sustainability in Tunneling—Bibliometrics, Challenges, and Solutions

Marco Huymajer,Leopold Winkler,Hubert Biedermann,Matthias Woegerbauer,Alexandra Mazak-Huemer

doi:10.3390/su14042275

Abstract

Sustainability is defined by current research as an interdisciplinary field comprising environmental, social, and economic aspects. This paper presents a systematic literature review following the PRISMA guidelines investigating how authors currently view sustainability issues in the specific context of tunneling. Thereby, we introduce a new methodology for reviewing sustainability aspects in an interdisciplinary way, where key bibliographic metrics are derived from the metadata of the reviewed literature. Regarding the content of the articles, we cluster sustainability aspects into specific topics and discuss challenges and solutions. In addition, we examine the role of digital technologies applied in sustainable tunneling. Our results show that there is a lack of interdisciplinary studies and that the current research does not represent all three dimensions of sustainability equally. The current research focuses on assessing the status quo instead of presenting specific solutions. Finally, we see great potential to further leverage digital tools to enable sustainable tunneling.

Highlights

In 1992, over 170 countries participated in the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janerio and jointly formulated the “Agenda 21” [1], a global development and environment action plan
Since Ledford [19] points out that some of the world’s biggest problems such as sustainability can only be solved with a shared understanding of several research disciplines, an opinion that we strongly share, we focus on interdisciplinary in the implementation of our systematic literature review
The results suggest that the World Tunnel Congress (WTC) is by far the most popular venue for sustainability in tunneling

Summary

Introduction

In 1992, over 170 countries participated in the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janerio and jointly formulated the “Agenda 21” [1], a global development and environment action plan This plan defines a concept including three dimensions— called pillars—of sustainable development, which are still valid today considering an economic, ecological, and social aspect. Despite the broadness of sustainability and its relevant factors in all three dimensions, there is no doubt that environmental issues such as climate change mitigation are among the most urgent challenges humanity faces today [3,4]. In this regard, the 2019 Global Status

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