Environmental and Sustainability Impact Assessment of Infrastructure in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Sustainability, now embedded within the legislation and development policy of the United Kingdom, is beginning also to be implemented within the design and construction process. Methods to assess the sustainability of construction projects have been in development since the early 1990s, but to date the majority have focused on the building sector, with little consideration for the detailed assessment of civil engineering projects. In addition, the tools developed have rarely considered sustainability in its widest sense, instead concentrating on the more quantifiable aspects of the environment, ecology, and building material use. The U.K. civil engineering industry has attempted to fill this gap with the development of the Civil Engineering and Environmental Quality Assessment and Award Scheme (CEEQUAL). The use of CEEQUAL is voluntary, but it is seen as a benchmark for assessing the environmental and social impact of infrastructure. Background to sustainability assessment for projects in the United Kingdom and the development of CEEQUAL and areas for improvement are presented. The paper then presents the results of a backanalysis for three infrastructure projects, with CEEQUAL to assess the design teams’ compliance with and comprehension of sustainability issues within their projects. Although infrastructure design teams are likely to engage with sustainability issues in assessment areas in which they have previous experience (such as environmental impact and biodiversity), more education is required to encourage increased awareness in the relatively new areas of design assessment, including minimizing carbon footprint, material specifications, and material use and reuse.

Corporate Responsibility Practices in Engineering Consultancies

“…A large body of work has been produced looking at the role of sustainability in the construction sector, but to date the majority of this focuses on the impact of buildings and materials (Willetts et al, 2010). At present there is less emphasis on the efforts of individual businesses to address CR, despite the industry being classed as having a high impact across a broad range of issues such as emissions, waste, energy and water usage as well as its scale and size of labour force.…”

Optimization of Urban Highway Bypass Horizontal Alignment: A Methodological Overview of Intelligent Spatial MCDA Approach Using Fuzzy AHP and GIS

“…The growing need for highway planners and designers to recognize the importance of sustainable development within civil engineering has been identified from a regulatory standpoint [60]. Environmental and engineering indicators are increasingly being used to assess the sustainability of transport and to facilitate decision making.…”

A systematic review of indicators to assess the sustainability of road infrastructure projects

“…Traditional impact assessment tools are often solely concerned with the environmental dimension, while the social and economic dimensions are less often considered (see Fischer [23] for strategic environmental assessment of transportation projects). This paper focuses on road infrastructure projects because of their impacts on the environment and society [30,50,83]. These projects are often key drivers of landscape transformations, habitat fragmentation, and societal change on both global and local scales [26,67], with impacts lasting for long periods (e.g., [22,72]) and producing intergenerational consequences (e.g., [32,52]).…”