Environmental Impacts of Construction in Building Industry—A Review of Knowledge Advances, Gaps and Future Directions

Abstract

The building-and-construction industry has been researched extensively over its life cycle regarding green and sustainable processes and techniques due to its major contributions towards energy consumption and its environmental impacts. Over the past decade, the construction stage of a building is often criticized for overlooking or approximating the environmental impacts as compared to other life-cycle stages of a building. This is evident through strong research findings regarding other building life-cycle stages in building-emission-assessment studies. With the drive towards digitization, the construction industry is receiving significant research attention in order to minimize environmental impacts at the construction stage. Despite these research initiatives, only a handful of recent review studies have systematically furnished current advances, gaps and future directions in environmentally sustainable building-construction techniques. The current study represents a systematic literature review of the environmental impacts at the building-construction stage with the objective of identifying the current findings, gaps and future research scopes. A bibliometric assessment revealed key author contributions, key research areas and collaboration aspects of research works related to environmental impacts of construction in building projects. Four major barriers and knowledge gaps in conducting a comprehensive assessment at the construction stage of a building were identified, including the lack of definition of a generic system boundary, difficulties in data collection, complex modeling issues and complications in the classification and analysis of emissions. The findings would provide key knowledge for passionate construction-industry stakeholders who are keen to benchmark green and sustainable construction practices in the building industry.