Sustainability in Building Construction-A Multilevel Approach

Abstract

The implementation of sustainable development principles requires integrating general goals for maintaining a balance between the environment, society and the economy into the specific area of work and responsibility of the actors involved, as well as their work and decision-making processes. It also requires adapting them to the specific object of assessment. For the construction and real estate industry, this means, among other things, extending the already complex interrelationships of designing, constructing and operating real estate properties by considering sustainability aspects. This not only has consequences for the decisionmaking processes of individual actors, but also for the exchange of information along the value chain and across the individual levels of action. Typical levels of action are the manufacturing of construction products, the provision of services (transport, construction site processes), the building, the neighbourhood, the city, the region, the national building stock. Selected actors also deal with the management of municipal, commercial and institutional building stocks. At all levels of action, developments are currently underway to support sustainable development. At the product level, the extension of the present scope of Environmental Product Declarations in the direction of additional requirements for environmental information is currently underway. This development will allow the reporting of additional indicators for the quantification of environmental impacts on the global environment, support a more sophisticated assessment of the GWP, and provide guidance on risks to health and the local environment as additional information. At the construction level, the results of a sustainability assessment in determining the value of the asset as well as determining the conditions for financing and insurance will be taken into account more than ever before. Again, the consideration of additional indicators in the environmental performance assessment is discussed. BIM provides a tool to handle complex design and assessment tasks that affect data delivery requirements - EPDs must be designed to be BIMable among others. The aim is to combine life cycle costing (LCC) and life cycle assessment (LCA). The life cycle carbon footprint is becoming an important indicator. Almost all countries are currently working on the introduction of compulsory calculation and assessment rules as well as carbon footprint benchmarks. This is also integrated as a requirement in the green public procurement. It remains to be seen what impact the introduction of taxes or fees on CO2 can have.