Sustainable Assessment of Public Works through a Multi-Criteria Framework

Rogério Moreno Perlingeiro,Elaine Garrido Vazquez,Christine Kowal Chinelli,Carlos Alberto Pereira Soares,Mayra Soares Pereira Lima Perlingeiro,Eduardo Linhares Qualharini,Ahmed W A Hammad,Assed N Haddad

doi:10.3390/su12176896

Rogério Moreno Perlingeiro, Elaine Garrido Vazquez + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12176896

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Abstract

Enhancing the sustainability of public works has been a key agenda in recent years for many governmental organizations. Public works contribute significantly to a large portion of engineering works and have great potential to impact the sustainability of cities. Thus, evaluating the sustainability of these projects is highly relevant, mainly regarding their impacts on environmental, social, and economic aspects. There are currently assessment systems and methods with different scopes and approaches. Yet, there remains uncertainty when it comes to considering public works’ sustainability and how useful criteria can be incorporated into the proposed assessment tasks to ensure such a goal. This study contributes to filling this gap by developing, through an extensive and detailed bibliographic research, a flexible and comprehensive framework composed of 214 criteria distributed across nine categories that measure the degree of sustainability of public works, with emphasis on economic, social and environmental goals. The proposed framework can act as a practical tool, functioning as a checklist applicable to all types of public construction works, and at any stage of the lifecycle. Evaluation of the framework by professionals indicated its suitability when encompassing sustainability objectives, its viability, and its ease of use.

Highlights

The construction industry is known as a sector that consumes a lot of energy, with high rates of use of natural resources, which negatively impacts the environment [1,2,3]
In Section 2.7.1, we present the summaries of the phases of the construction lifecycle, what each phase contemplates, and the interconnections of the criteria used in the framework with these phases
The procedure adopted was: Step 1—We provide all the documents of the notice and advise them to read the material in detail and understand all aspects of the construction; Step 2—We briefly explain the concepts of sustainability of works, the operation of the spreadsheets detailed in item 3 (Figures 6–9) of the framework, and where to look for the information to be able to evaluate correctly

Summary

Introduction

The construction industry is known as a sector that consumes a lot of energy, with high rates of use of natural resources, which negatively impacts the environment [1,2,3]. The impacts of construction on the environment are higher in developing countries [8,9,10,11], whose participation in the world economy is growing at a notable rate [12]. Bibliographic research has shown that there is a scarcity of studies that focus on how public works’ evaluation is carried out to ensure the sustainability of construction projects in developing countries. In Brazil, public works account for 31.7% of the sector [16], with a significant impact on issues of sustainability. When compared to private enterprises, public enterprises are still lagging in terms of their sustainability assessment tools for their projects [17]

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