Special Issue on Engineering Management for Sustainable Development

Abstract

We are very pleased to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Management in Engineering, titled “Engineering Management for Sustainable Development.” From an academic and research focus, sustainability within the built environment has traditionally been closely linked to habitat preservation and recycling of construction materials. For the past decade, we have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of environmental stewardship practices and policies involving energy efficiency, water conservation, climate change, renewable portfolio standards, and other issues. These advances expand the boundary of engineering management research and pose grand challenges for managing engineering projects in the context of nature, society, and future generations. Sustainable development aims to create the conditions in which humans and the environment exist in productive harmony. Sustainability research across the built environment has been continuously evolving because of its very nature and its relative youth as an academic focus. With this special issue, we aim to capitalize on the trend toward sustainable development by documenting this evolution, especially in light of the interface between sustainability and engineering management from a broader perspective. We believe that it is important for both researchers and practitioners to get a better understanding of where we stand and where we are headed. Our motivation seemed fully justified when our call for papers yielded nearly 30 submissions by the deadline. In total, 11 manuscripts were accepted for publication. We selected nine of them for inclusion in the special issue. Because of editorial issues and space limitations, the other two will be published later in regular issues. We are grateful to the authors of the papers for being responsive to the needs and deadlines of the special issue. We also thank the authors of all of the other papers that were submitted to the special issue. Without their participation, this endeavor would not have been a success. We would also like to thank all the reviewers and the journal publishing office for their continued support. Their tireless efforts and prompt responses helped us commit ourselves to this undertaking. This special issue features a paper by Chris Hendrickson regarding the engineering management challenges for sustainable infrastructure development. His paper lays out the main characteristics of sustainable energy infrastructure and outlines three engineering management priorities—energy efficiency, land use, and engineering education—during the switch to sustainable engineering. The remaining eight papers are categorized into three groups according to the subject of the papers. The first group of two papers deals with the ecological impact analysis of infrastructure project. The first paper, by Stephen Comello, Michael Lepech, and Benedict Schwegler, presents a general framework for ecosystem service valuation of infrastructure projects. In the second paper, Florian Gschosser, Holger Wallbaum, and Michael Boesch analyze the ecological potential of pavement construction. Three papers in the second group focus on carbon accounting methodologies for various facilities and construction operations, including water pipeline projects by Kalyan Piratla, Samuel Ariaratnam, and Aaron Cohen; construction equipment operation by Phil Lewis, Michael Leming, and William Rasdorf; and educational facilities by TaeHoon Hong, HyunJoong Kim, and TaeHyun Kwak. The last group of papers emphasizes the role of renewable energy for sustainable development. The first paper, written by Maria Balatbat, Emily Findlay, and David Carmichael evaluates the performance risk of 227 renewable energy projects under the clean development mechanism. The second paper, by Dezhi Li, Eddie Chi Man Hui, Xing Xu, and Qiming Li, focuses on the sustainability assessment on metro systems on the basis of an energy-based methodology. In the last paper, Rahul Hiremath and Bimlesh Kumar examine the economic feasibility of bioenergy through linear goal programming. The group of papers in this special issue represents a cross section of engineering management issues associated with sustainable development. Yet the interface and interaction between engineering management issues and sustainability are much broader and even more complex. We hope the special issue can spur thoughtful discussions on the role of engineering management for sustainable development and therefore promote further research and wide participation in this field from the engineering management community.