Environmental consequences of infrastructure provision

The building sector is a voracious consumer of primary materials. Thus, improving resource efficiency is critical to reduce the environmental impacts of constructing and maintaining the built environment. As a result of this challenge, a growing body of research has been investigating where—and for what purposes—construction materials are consumed in cities.

The Sustainable Systems Research Group works to improve the way environmental consequences of infrastructure (e.g., material use, greenhouse gas emissions, land use changes) are defined, measured, and interpreted for research and policy purposes. Our research efforts include:

• The development and analysis of primary material use data for different types of infrastructure such as roads and housing
• Uncertainty analyses on existing methodologies for environmental consequence measuring
• Analyzing policies that regulate and define the goals for infrastructure provision in terms of environmental consequences

Please find a non-exhaustive list of relevant publications below: