Special Issue on Considerations of Sustainability in Construction Engineering and Management

Abstract

We are happy to present this special issue on considerations of sustainability. We received 56 abstract submissions, of which 35 full papers were invited. After full peer review, 12 of the 35 papers were identified for publication in the special issue. We would like to thank the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management for encouraging us and supporting us in our efforts at compiling this issue. This publication comes at a very exciting time in the construction industry. The state of California has a legislative mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Other states such as Illinois are investing heavily in constructing and maintaining highway infrastructure that has lower environmental impacts. There has also been a focus on the development of rating systems, such as INVEST, supported by the Federal Highway Administration, and Envision, developed by ASCE. Stakeholders in the construction industry are being challenged to adopt practices to construct and maintain environmentally friendly infrastructure designed to sustain livable communities. Within this context, the research community is playing an important role in supporting the development of relevant best practices to further the goals of the industry. It is expected that the papers in this issue will showcase some of the trends in current sustainability research while identifying research gaps and pointing to a future agenda in integrating principles of sustainability in construction engineering and management. The footprint of this issue spans topics in construction operations, infrastructure systems management, buildings and energy, materials, project delivery, information technology, and livable communities. The following are some of the noticeable themes emerging from the compilation: • Life-cycle assessment (LCA) has emerged as a dominant methodology. It is used to discriminate between alternative products and processes and to estimate environmental impacts. Future work can further develop general project-based LCA frameworks for construction operations and processes for application across systems as different as buildings and pavements. • Rating systems can serve as important tools to aid decision makers in uniformly implementing the results of a LCA analysis. This issue presents papers that develop rating systems and papers that investigate the underlying frameworks that support the identification of sustainability factors. In the future, research aligning rating systems and quantitative, LCA-based estimates of environmental impacts may provide useful pointers for practitioners. • A number of papers studied the life-cycle impact of decisions made during the design and construction phases on the performance and use of a facility or infrastructure. Integration across life cycles of infrastructure systems presents challenging questions that are difficult to generalize given the diversity of construction systems. • Efforts at integrating sustainability principles into the undergraduate and graduate curricula are necessary for preparing future decision makers. This must be complemented by outreach to today’s decision makers and practitioners to encourage the adoption of best practices. The most important need of the hour is to develop a coherent set of methodologies that can be used by construction researchers, with the ultimate goal of developing tools that can be used by owners, contractors, and agencies to support best practices. Efforts at integrating design information and decision making across different life-cycle stages, combined with a mix of qualitative and quantitative assessment methods, are a good start. Given the diversity of the field, it will be necessary to develop suitable benchmarks and case studies along the way. Indeed, much has been done to address these challenges. Research pertaining to considerations of sustainability in construction has progressed far enough to merit serious consideration as an individual topic. It has been a well-established track at the Construction Research Congress since 2009 and most recently was been identified as a specialty area within this journal. We hope this special issue will energize research in this area and help develop a fruitful body of work within this journal.