Guest editorial: Accelerating built environment sustainability: proactive research, policies and procurement

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides an overview of current research themes in built environment sustainability, including circular economy and digitalization, useful for identifying research gaps.

🏢実務担当者:Highlights procurement protocols and digital technologies that can be adopted to enhance sustainability in construction projects and supply chains.

🏛政策担当者:Emphasizes the need for national policies that integrate environmental, economic, and social sustainability, offering a framework for accelerating net-zero targets.

The construction industry accounts for 36% of global energy use, 39% of carbon emissions and approximately one-third of waste generation globally. With the United Nations projecting a population increase of 2 billion within the next 3 decades, reaching around 9.7 billion by 2050, there is a heightened demand for building stock, resulting in increased development. This expansion brings about significant adverse effects such as environmental pollution, climate change and waste generation. Urgent action is crucial to accelerate the built environment towards sustainability. Development of national policies is a critical step towards achieving the net-zero targets by 2050, as was agreed by many countries that signed the United Nations Paris climate agreement. Therefore, the proposed theme of the Special Issue aims to unearth, develop and disseminate innovative approaches based on cutting-edge research and leading-edge practices, particularly related to policies and procurement that proactively incentivise sustainability in the built environment. For example, this could be through carefully developed procurement protocols, including proactive stakeholder selection criteria, contractual arrangements and contract management.All three pillars of sustainability – environmental, economic and social – being important for sustainable development, national policies that incorporate and support these three pillars should be developed to help accelerate sustainability in the built environment. In the next phases of translating policies to procurement protocols and then to common practice: there is a need for procurement-related research and best practices that focus, for example, on stakeholder selection, contracts and management, that incentivise sustainability throughout supply chains. Digital technologies can enable more timely, focused and suitably detailed information and knowledge flows that will help accelerate the built environment towards sustainability. Within this context, the Special Issue presents research in trending areas related to technological advancements in a circular economy, green buildings, net zero emissions, construction materials and processes. These are found to be essentials in explaining, exploring and implementing novel strategies, policies and practices that accelerate the shift of our built environment towards holistic sustainability.This Special Issue comprises 21 papers that contribute to environmental, economic and social dimensions of sustainability focusing particularly on research, policies and procurement. The papers are ordered considering the themes that have been addressed, where the first two papers (papers 1–2) have focused on carbon emissions and achieving net zero carbon. The next four papers (papers 3–6) discuss different aspects of environmental, economic and social sustainability. Papers 7 and 8 are based on reverse logistics and waste management. The next four papers (Papers 9–12) address different aspects of circular economy. The subsequent three papers (Papers 13–15) are aligned with digitalisation and digital technologies. Papers 16–18 focus on health and safety particularly related to social sustainability as well as mental well-being. The final three papers (Papers 19–21) are related to improving the construction industry in terms of materials, processes and procurement.The first paper by Siva et al. (2025) identifies the key barriers and enablers to driving a zero-carbon construction strategy and the key findings are demonstrated through a framework. The study presents zero-carbon action priorities for four significant stakeholder groups in the built environment: developers, building occupiers, educators and government. The second paper by Kumar and Zhang (2025) investigates the procurement and policies for carbon emission reduction in the construction industry of the United States (US). The study employed a qualitative methodology that comprised semi-structured interviews with industry professionals alongside an innovative engagement with generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) technology to gather insights into procurement and project delivery methods role in carbon emission reduction. It highlights the inter-relationship between contracting methods, stakeholder engagement and the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI) in enhancing policies and practices to decarbonise the US construction industry.Sustainability is a key phenomenon to be addressed ensuring that the needs of the present are addressed without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The third paper by Choudhary et al. (2025) evaluates copper tailings as a sustainable alternative to conventional structural materials. The study conducted a lifecycle assessment (LCA) analysis on copper tailings and conventional sand foundation, and an assessment on environmental impacts of a case study in India. Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out to identify the impact of transportation distance on environmental impacts. The findings revealed that the use of copper tailings is more environmentally beneficial than sand and the distance has a negative impact on the environmental benefits. The authors of the fourth paper, Vafaie et al. (2025), evaluate how success factors identified from the literature review contribute to the success of a real-world adaptive reuse case study. Fenix I in Netherlands, being a transformation project that has won many awards, has been selected as the case study to assess the success of the adaptive reuse phenomenon. The fifth paper by Ikudayisi and Adegun (2025) presents pathways in policy, research and practice for accelerating green building in fast growing countries considering Nigeria as a case study. Vidanapathirana et al. (2025), in the sixth paper, study how investor’s willingness to pay is impacted by air pollution concentrations within a high-dense high-rise building cluster. The building configurations of Port City, Sri Lanka, have been used to model using Ansys Fluent. The findings revealed that increased building density and porosity along the ambient wind direction encourage pollutant dispersion and will positively impact the investor’s willingness to pay. The authors believe that the findings can be used to refine urban design regulations to promote air quality and wind movement to improve the quality of investments.Reverse logistics in construction refers to the supply chain process of moving products and materials from a demolished building or construction site back through the supply chain to be reused or recycled. The seventh paper by Wijewickrama et al. (2025) integrates quality into the reverse logistics in construction through an extensive literature review and semi-structured interviews. The authors reveal the importance of an information-centric quality assurance system including process, people, policy and technology, in reverse logistics supply chains. The authors of the eighth paper, Eze et al. (2025), identify the factors that impede the adoption of building information modelling (BIM) in construction waste management at the design and pre-contract stages from the perspective of construction stakeholders in Nigeria. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey and reliability of data was tested using Cronbach’s alpha test, normalities test, Frequency, Percentage, Kendall’s coefficient of concordance and chi-square tests, and data were analysed using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and exploratory factors analysis (EFA). The identified factors have been categorised into four clusters: (1) knowledge and resistance barriers, (2) support and interest barriers, (3) interoperability and experts’ barriers, and (4) economic barriers.The next cluster of papers focus on circular economy (CE). In the ninth paper, Sadiq and Khalfan (2025) conducted a bibliometric analysis on the application of CE principles within the construction demolition industry. The findings present the relationship between CE principles with a specific emphasis on construction demolition industry, building practices and supply chain management. The tenth paper by Flores Lara et al. (2025) focuses on integrating Industry 4.0 technologies with CE principles in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) construction sector, aligning with the UAE circular economy policy 2021–2031 (UAECEP). The study introduced a policy-aligned conceptual framework for endorsing circular practices throughout the life cycle of infrastructure projects within the UAECEP. The authors of the eleventh paper, Wanaguru et al. (2025), developed a circularity assessment framework for selection of building materials alongside CE principles. The authors opined that the framework can be used to prioritise materials that can be reused, recycled or remanufactured, which not only reduces environmental impact but also offers economic benefits by lowering material costs and enhancing resource efficiency. The twelfth paper by Al-Qazzaz et al. (2025) conducted a systematic literature review on integrating BIM into building circularity assessment. Findings revealed that there has been an increase in the development of BIM-based building circularity assessment tools in recent years. Using Autodesk Revit as the BIM software, most tools developed were based on the material circularity indicator.The next three papers focus on digitalisation. In the thirteenth paper, Chang et al. (2025) investigate the capabilities of cloud-based BIM in managing quality asset information, drawing upon software engineers’ perspectives. The findings present the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and technological limitations of cloud-based BIM. Gamage et al. (2025) in the fourteenth paper present the barriers for implementing blockchain in Sri Lanka along with strategies to overcome them. The study introduced a framework to adopt blockchain and smart contracts in the Sri Lankan construction industry. The authors of the fifteenth p

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