Decarbonizing buildings across their entire life cycle calls for the transformation of the buildings and construction sector.  The transformation requires greater collaboration among policymakers at all jurisdictional levels as well as with urban planners, architects, developers, investors, construction companies, and ...

The Sustainable Products Initiative (SPI) is a regulatory framework comprising a set of legislative files that aims to boost the circularity of the EU’s single market.  The European Commission (EC) proposed the regulation on March 30 2022 intending to make sustainable products the norm in the EU, facilitate circular bu ...

This is a framework for cities and other government bodies to develop a strategy, action plan, and policies in response to the climate emergency.  It is a manual and blueprint to dramatically reduce embodied carbon from the manufacture, transport, use, and life-cycle end of construction material.  It helps cities in re ...

Climate legal action is increasingly being taken against national governments.  Litigation has successfully forced some countries to radically improve on their commitments to tackle the effects and limit the extent of anthropogenic climate change.  This paper examines three recent European cases that produced landmark ...

Developers, investors and policymakers must respond with urgency to the threatening climate and ecosystem crisis and set targets aligning with the 2015 Paris Agreement.  All participants in the new-build and building renovation value chain must cooperate to establish a standard performance system based on sustainable a ...

Environmental defenders are individuals and collectives who take action to protect the environment and to protest unjust and unsustainable use of resources.  This paper provides insight on the characteristics of environmental conflicts, the engaged environmental defenders, and successful mobilization strategies.  The p ...

There are various global temperature rise and ecosystem impact scenarios, representing uncertainty that affects climate change exposure and vulnerability.  This IPCC report summarizes the current understanding of observed climate change impacts on ecosystems, human societies and their cities, settlements, infrastructur ...

Sustainable procurement management (SPM) as an approach to integrating sustainability into construction projects that takes into account the social, ecological, and economic consequences of procurement decisions.  This study recognizes several challenges that obstruct the effective interaction between stakeholders in a ...

This study demonstrates the environmental impact of building materials from production and construction, including transport, replacement and deconstruction, for a single-family house in Sweden.  It focused on building materials, materials transport, replacement of essential construction materials, and the environmenta ...

Under 3.2 °C warming, 49% of insects, 44% of plants and 26% of vertebrates are at great risk of extinction.  Best-case scenarios lead to a median range of 2.9–3.2°C in 2100 for current policies and 2.4–2.9°C in 2100 for 2030 pledges.  If the targets were promptly and fully implemented, some estimate this could bring te ...

The world will warm by 3.2°C this century even if all the policies to cut carbon that governments have so far adopted were fully implemented.  The high overshoot will increase climate risks for vulnerable regions and societies, causing unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, and widespread water shortages and irrev ...

The development and construction of sustainable tourism destinations ensure that the long-term quality performance of their environment and community life will be sustained. Sustainability is key to managing and maintaining the image and competitiveness of tourism destinations. This study focuses on the future environm ...

Most real estate entities lack the strategy, culture and tools to realize their professed sustainability aspirations.  They present their intentions mostly qualitatively and report few quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) that reveal the degree of achieving such priority Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) a ...

In construction projects, integration of the three social, economic, and environmental aspects of the triple bottom line (TBL) principle is challenging.  Green building rating schemes, such as LEED and BREEAM, fail to fully consider the projects' life cycle sustainability.  This study presents a sustainable constructio ...

The global construction industry is the world’s largest consumer of raw materials.  Construction accounts for 25%–40% of total carbon emissions globally.  Companies across all sectors of the construction value chain are embedding sustainability into their operations and products, developing innovative green products, a ...