Silva, Fernanda Belizario (2022) Proposal of life cycle-based environmental performance indicators for decision-making in construction. PhD thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
Abstract
Humanity must drastically reduce the impacts caused on the environment, especially global warming, and the construction sector contributes significantly to many environmental impacts. Therefore, improving the environmental performance throughout the life cycle of buildings is essential, especially because there is still much to build. Despite this, most decisions in this sector do not consider environmental criteria. This work aims to propose a set of indicators to measure the environmental performance throughout the life cycle of buildings in a practical and accessible way so that these indicators can be used for decision-making. To this end, the characteristics that can increase the probability of using environmental performance indicators for decision making are identified: indicators must be focused on priority environmental aspects, reliable, comparable, and easy to measure and understand. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most recommended method for assessing the environmental performance of construction. Therefore, a cradle-to-grave LCA study of a typical Brazilian building is performed to understand the meaning of each impact result. It is concluded that LCA indicators cover too many impact categories, some caused by processes that the construction sector can hardly influence. Also, LCA indicators are difficult to measure and understand. Thus, a simplification of LCA is proposed, resulting in five indicators to assess the environmental performance over the construction life cycle: material demand, energy demand, water demand, land occupation and CO2 emission. These indicators present low correlation among themselves, assess priority environmental aspects that the construction sector can influence, and can be easily measured and understood. This proposal is expected to increase the use of life-cycle based environmental performance indicators to guide decisions and reduce the environmental impacts caused by the construction sector.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | John, Vanderley Moacyr |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | decision-making; environmental performance; life cycle assessment; sustainable construction |
| Index terms: | land, simplification, energy demand, environmental performance, life cycle, environmental impact, decision-making, construction sector, sustainable construction, proposal, global warming, life cycle assessment, meaning, occupation |
| Subjects: | sustainability assessment, sustainable construction, project planning, environmental impact, climate science, decision analysis, sociology, industry analysis, management, real estate economics, energy systems, value management |
| Topics: | Urban Studies, Research Practice, Business Strategy, Roles and Professions, Project Management, Sustainability, Risk Management |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCT |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here