The principles of circularity for the sustainable design of buildings aim to reduce their environmental impact.  Environmental product declarations (EPD) and carbon footprint tools are the most useful tools for classifying building materials and evaluating circular projects.  Other life cycle assessment (LCA) tools are ...

Owners, designers, contractors, and manufacturers must radically rethink the way we use, renovate, and design buildings.  Using better and less materials is key to reducing embodied carbon in meeting our CO₂ emission targets.  For this, tracking the environmental impacts of the whole building life cycle – from material ...

To decarbonize buildings, architects and building designers must reduce the environmental footprint and CO2 emissions associated with materials over the whole life cycle of building.  Through life cycle assessment (LCA), the highest-impact, most cost-effective solutions to reducing embodied carbon are identified.  This ...

Construction is responsible for a huge amount of emissions and environmental degradation.  How and by whom materials are made is key to transitioning to a sustainable economy.  An important tool in assessing the ecological impacts is environmental product declarations (EPD), which are product-specific impact assessment ...

SustainUK is inviting you to UK Construction Week London 2022, delivering the largest built environment exhibition at ExCeL London on 3-5 May 2022. SustainUK facilitates and mainstreams Paris-aligned sustainable building development and to overcome real or perceived barriers. SustainUK's collaborative sustainability pr ...

Environmental claims are part of the movement in seeking justice and taking legal action to promote social, economic and environmental sustainability. State and EU-level climate action and policies are being challenged for being insufficient to limit the global average temperature increase to below 2°C, as stipulated i ...

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 ...

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 ...