GUIDELINES AND PRACTICES FOR CUSTOMISATION OF SUSTAINABILITY INDICATORS FOR USE IN CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS – A REVIEW OF LITERATURE

J. Ram1, M. Sutrisna2 1 2

University of Adelaide Curtin University

[email protected]

Buildings account for more than 40% of global energy use and generates one-third of global green house emissions (GHG). This raises importance of creating building stock that facilitates efficient use of energy and produces less GHG emissions. Building environment assessment schemes or indicator systems provide guidelines to design buildings that meet sustainability needs as well as help measure the sustainability performance of the buildings. However, every project is unique and that requires sustainability indicators to be customised to meet the specific project needs. While lack of customisation of indicator systems has been highlighted as one of the lingering problem, little is known on practices and processes to customise sustainability indicators. This study attempts to address this gap in knowledge. We conduct a review of literature on sustainability indicators related to building construction discipline in order to identify the practices, processes, techniques, and guidelines used by organizations to customise the indicators for their projects. Based on the literature review, we found that organizations do not have established practices, procedures and guidelines to customise indicators for their project. We find that due to existence of a large number of indicator systems, it is difficult to select criteria, sub-criteria, set weightings and indicator appraisal criteria related to project objectives. It underlines the importance of more research that could help organizations in decision making process of selection of their sustainability project objectives, and indicators. It is expected that having practices and guidelines for customisation of indicators will help organizations in achieving sustainability performance goals.

INTRODUCTION The buildings, both residential and commercial, account for more than 40% of global energy use and produce about one third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (UNEP 2009). It is estimated that about 10-20% of the energy use is caused by transportation, construction, maintenance and demolition activities during the lifecycle of building projects (UNEP 2009). The use of project-based indicators is considered as the main ‘building block’ to not only understand the energy performance requirements of the projects, but also to devise mitigation strategies and policies to reduce the impacts of GHG emissions (UNCED 1992; UNEP 2009). Over the years, a number of indicator systems have been developed, such as ABGR, BASIX, BREEAM, GBTool, GreenStar, LEED, NABERS (Ding 2008). These indicator systems provide benchmarks and performance criteria for achieving sustainability efficiencies across whole life cycle of the project in siting and design, energy, water, materials, waste reductions, and indoor environmental quality (ABS 2012). However, every project is unique and customisation of indicators based on the nature, scope, intended use, the potential economic, social and environmental impact of the project becomes critical to achieve sustainability performance outcome (FIDIC 2004). Currently, little is known about the practices adopted by the organizations for customisation of the project-based indicators at planning, design and execution stages of the construction projects and the effect of these customisation practices on sustainability performance outcome. This research aims to address this gap in knowledge and investigates the following research questions: What are the current practices, procedures and methods employed by organizations to customize/adjust sustainable development project–based indicators taking into account the goals, priorities and needs of the specific projects when they plan, design and execute the construction projects? The paper is organized as follows. Next we present a brief review of the literature, followed by methodology used by the study. It is followed by discussion and analysis. Lastly, we present limitation and further research directions. LITERATURE REVIEW Sustainable construction has been defined in a number of different ways. Shelbourne et al. (2006, p.59) summarized the definitions of sustainable construction by various authors as ‘a construction process which incorporates the basic themes of sustainable development. Such construction processes would thus bring environmental responsibility, social awareness, and economic profitability objectives to the fore in the

built environment and facilities for the wider community’. In other words, ‘sustainability as the extent to which progress and development should meet the need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (cited in Curwell and Cooper, 1998, p.554). To assess the sustainability of construction, a system of indicators is often used (e.g. Hashim et al., 2008). Hakkinen (2008, p. 248) stated that ‘sustainability indicators help to consider complicated ecological, social, cultural and economic phenomena in decision-making at all levels’. Sustainability indicators are tools for measuring performance and monitoring progress against set parameters and recognized standards (FIDIC 2004; van Zeijl-Rozema, Ferraguto & Caratti 2011). These indicators provide sustainability benchmarks in four major categories: environmental (e.g. water, land, biodiversity etc), social (equity, health etc), economical (e.g. economic structure), and institutional (e.g. institutional capacity) (Labuschagne, Brent & Van Erck 2005). Given the broad application of indicators across various aspects of construction project lifecycle, the successful use of these indicator systems is significantly dependent on their customisation and aligning at planning, design and execution stages to the needs of the particular projects (Ding 2008; Hak, Kovanda & Weinzettel 2012), an aspect that was also highlighted in Agenda 21 declaration (UNCED 1992). One of the challenges in promoting effective use of these indicator systems is to gain a better understanding of the practices / process and procedures adopted by the organizations in customizing the indicators and then transforming the principles and knowledge into practical models for future implementations (Mwasha, Williams & Iwaro 2011). The main goal of this research is thus to provide an understanding of the customisation practices and how these practices influence the sustainable performance outcome. METHODOLOGY We collected data for this study by performing a systematic review of the literature. The data collection procedure comprised of the following steps: 1. The sample frame of the data was the literature on construction and built environment and the population of the study was the research articles published in that domain. 2. First we performed keywords search of the three very popular online databases: Science Dire6ct, Google Scholar, and Emerald Management Xtra. We chose these databases as we expected that the search of these databases will result in good coverage of the relevant literature.

3. We used a variety of keywords combinations to extract the relevant literature from the databases. The keywords combinations are given in Table 1. Table 1. Key-words combinations used for data collection Key words “Customization practices for sustainability indicators”

Key words “Process to customize project based sustainability indicators”

“International construction projects + customizing sustainability indicators” “International construction projects + sustainability indicators” “Factors + customization of sustainable development project– based indicators”

“International construction projects + localizing indicators” “Customization of the project based indicators” “Guidelines for customizing project based indicators”

4. The keywords search yielded at times thousands of articles, so initially we screened the titles and keywords of the articles for their relevance to the objectives of the study. If we find the title and keywords relevant, we downloaded the article. Such a screening process led to downloading of 202 articles published between 1995-2013. The year-wise classification of the downloaded articles is given in Table 2. Table 2. Year of publication of articles Year 1995 and no date article 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

No. of articles 5 2 1 9 12 7 8 11 5 9 19 22 18 15 14 14 19 9 3

References Spence & Mulligan (1995) Polster et al., (1996) Hill & Bowen (1997) Cole (1998) Koebel (1999) Hien et al., (2000) Morse et al., (2001) Duchêne et al., (2002) Kazandjian et al., (2003) Hezri (2004) Dasgupta & Tam (2005) Ou et al., (2006) Ugwu & Haupt (2007) Retzlaff (2008) Singh et al., (2009) Mascarenhas et al., (2010) Hiete et al., (2011) Xu et al., (2012) Lee (2013)

5. Next, we reviewed the downloaded articles by reading abstracts to examine their relevance to the objectives of the study. The authors tried to identify articles that have discussed the customisation of indicator systems. Such a screening process led to re-categorisation of research articles in the categories as given in Table 3. Table 3. Re-Categorisation of 202 research articles Category Indicator Development Project lifecycle related indicators Indicator assessment processes and procedures Post occupancy assessments

No. of Some references articles 68 Yang et al., (2013) 8 McLellan & Corder (2012)

Strategies and Policies for development of indicators Sustainability experience of organizations Customisation of indicator systems Theory of sustainability General discussion on sustainability

25 Ortiz, Castells & Sonnemann (2009) 4 Chau, Tse & Chung (2010) 46 Scanlon & Davis (2011) 2 Jones, Shan & Goodrum (2010) 19 Cole & Mitchell (1999) 1 Cabezas & Fath (2002) 29 Guy (2010)

6. This iterative screening process yielded a total of nineteen research articles which related to customisation of indicator systems, which were then further examined. These nineteen articles were read in detail to identify any guidelines, procedure, practices adopted by organizations for customisation of indicator systems. 7. The research articles which were filtered through the above described process formed the basis of discussion and conclusions of this study as below. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Based on the review of the literature, our findings suggest that very few studies have actually investigated the methods, principles, procedures and techniques used in the built environment industry to customise indicator systems in the context of project. Some of the relevant streams are discussed below. A number of studies have highlighted the importance of indicator systems that reflect national, regional and local differences. Liu et al., (2006) proposed a three-step approach for developing regionally-specific tools.

Their approach divided sustainability factors in ‘performance’ and ‘decision-making’ factors and created a framework which then formed the basis of developing regionally specific indicators. Development of common local indicators that allows monitoring of interaction among local and regional sustainability was highlighted by Mascarenhas et al., (2010). They also proposed a framework that integrated local and regional strategies, and public participation to develop local common indicators through a process of scoping, selection and development and obtaining of finalized set of local indicators. Todd and Geissler (1999) underlined the importance of having a uniform and practical international indicator system which while providing consistency of performance benchmarking allows customization based on regional context. However, Herrera-Ulloa et al., (2003, p.359) found that it could be problematic. While developing a sustainability index, they proposed that the top-down approach where national level sustainability indicators are devolved into development of regional and local level indicators ‘could mask the presence of sub-national regions with strongly unsustainable conditions’. They emphasised that local and regional level indicators should be developed first which then be combined to draw a set of national indicators. van Zeijl-Rozema et al., (2011), on the other hand, compared region-specific issues in order to identify important sustainability themes and region-specific indicators. They observed that rigid indicator by indicator comparison is not feasible so focus should be on seeking broad picture of regional dynamics and then translate the knowledge in creation of broad national level indicator systems. Ugwu et al., (2006), and Ugwu and Haupt (2007) underlined the importance of systematic procedures, techniques and guidelines which facilitate customisation of sustainability indicators at the project level. They conceptualised a SUSAIP framework for appraisal of infrastructure projects and developed project specific KPIs for infrastructure sustainability assessment. Šaparauskas and Turskis (2006) used a similar approach to define a set of country-specific indicators and their values. Reed et al., (2006) proposed a procedure that took into account interaction with local communities to develop sustainability indicators. Among the authors who made some significant contributions for development of procedures and guidelines for customisation of indicators are Lee and Burnett (2006), Cole and Mitchell (1999), and Cole (2001). Lee and Burnett (2006) demonstrated how tools could be customized when they customized GB Tool for use in Hong Kong. Their customisation efforts focused on five dimensions: Criteria, Context, Weighting, Scoring, and Assessment methods. On the other hand, Cole and Mitchell (1999), and Cole (2001) proposed their review of customisation of GB Tool. Given the literature review, it seems that while a number of studies have recognised the importance of customisation of indicators systems to

integrate regional and local context, very few studies have actually researched the procedures and guidelines that can be used to customise. We find that there are no established practices, processes, techniques, and guidelines used by organizations to customise the indicators for their projects. We also find that due to existence of a large number of indicator systems, it is difficult to select criteria, sub-criteria, set weightings and indicator appraisal criteria related to project objectives. It underlines the importance of more research that could help organizations in decision making process of selection of their sustainability project objectives, and indicators. It is expected that having practices and guidelines for customisation of indicators will help organizations in achieving sustainability performance goals. CONTRIBUTIONS, LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH The theoretical contribution of this study is that it has highlighted a significant gap in knowledge on understanding of the practices, techniques, and guidelines for customising the indicator systems. The study has also provided classification of a number of research streams on sustainability indicators which will help in furthering research in this area. Practically the findings of the study will help draw attention of sustainability professionals towards lack of knowledge and the skills required to customise indicator systems based on the project needs. One of the limitations of this study is that despite our efforts to find as many relevant research articles as possible, we cannot completely eliminate the possibility of existence of papers that have not been considered by this study. Moreover since the search focussed on the papers relevant to the built environment only, so we cannot discount existence of papers in areas outside built environment that may have discussed the practices and guidelines to customise indicator systems and not considered in this study. While a number of key words were considered to perform search, but there could be other keywords which could be used to extract more papers on the subject. As a future research opportunity, we recommend that further dedicated studies should be undertaken to identify and analyse principles, methods, techniques, ways of doing things, and procedures used in the industry to adjust and customise sustainability indicator systems. Such knowledge can then be used for development of guidelines and best practice recommendations to help organizations customise indicator systems. REFERENCES ABS 2012, 8165.0 - Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits, Jun 2007 to Jun 2011 viewed July 1 2012, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/allprimarymainfeatures/5 14D970AA18B6DE0CA2577FF0011E061

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