ABSTRACT
The development of building and infrastructure directly influences the economic and social growth of nations. However, they also negatively impact the environment through massive resource consumption, waste generation, and pressure on natural resources. Hence, buildings and infrastructure should embrace sustainable practices that minimize harmful environmental impacts and enhance economic growth and social well-being throughout its life-cycle. Therefore, sustainability assessment gains significant relevance in these sectors. However, on evaluating the existing sustainability assessment methods, it can be observed that they are primarily focused only on the environmental pillar and lacks a coherent and robust structure encompassing all the dimensions of sustainability. These tools and methods also ignore the interdependencies and interactions between the social, economic and environmental aspects. Further, conventional assessment methods adopt a static approach in their mode of evaluation by ignoring the external and internal changes that could occur with time in the building’s long-life span. Therefore, this paper proposes a system dynamics-based modelling approach for sustainability evaluation that is capable of evaluating buildings by capturing the interdependencies between the pillars of sustainability as well as accommodating the dynamic temporal changes that occur in a building life cycle. A case study project from the Indian context demonstrates the features of the framework and its capabilities. Sustainability evaluation using this framework showed that currently, buildings need to focus on reducing energy consumption apart from achieving material efficiency. Similarly, it also demonstrates the importance of a dynamic sustainability assessment framework by illustrating the underestimation of emissions by about 50% when a static approach is adopted in terms of the building’s energy consumption. Therefore, this integrated framework could serve as a means to achieve sustainable development targets envisaged by nations.
