Abstract:
The world is moving towards sustainable, eco-friendly, recyclable materials to enhance the circular
economy and mitigate the issues of carbon footprint, overburdened landfills, and waste of natural resources.
As increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are a major contributor to climate change and global
warming, and the construction sector is one of the prominent sources of GHG emissions, it is essential to
precisely quantify and reduce the GHG emissions of this sector. This research presents a novel framework
by combining advanced tools i.e., building information modeling (BIM), Life cycle assessment (LCA),
Geographic Information System (GIS), and mathematical analysis of embodied emissions to obtain
accurate results. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach has been validated on a real case
study in Islamabad, Pakistan. Building model has been generated using BIM, and a complete LCA has
been conducted. With the selected route, embodied emissions have been calculated with mathematical
formulae. Targeted mitigation strategies have been proposed and an optimized route has been designed
using GIS tools along the suggested facility centers in the Islamabad region. The case study has been reassessed with alleviation strategies. The results show that 29.35% of the materialization stage and 14.77%
of the operational stage GHG emissions have been reduced. 11.53% of the end-of-life phase GHG
emissions have been reduced. Hence, pre-evaluating the environmental degradation caused by construction
projects at the design stage might offer an opportunity to comprehend and reduce prospective
environmental impacts. This study proposes a distinctive framework for the construction sector to enhance
its sustainability and eco-efficiency.
