• Energy Research

Purpose– Most barriers and enablers of sustainable projects are related to procurement. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for evaluating green procurement practices throughout the lifecycle of road construction projects and demonstrates its application through an Australian case study.Design/methodology/approach– The study is based on linking the phases of road construction with incentive mechanisms for proactively motivating behavioural change. A holistic view on utilised and potential incentives is attempted with a literature review and a state-of-practice review. The latter is based on interviews and 90 policy and procurement documents across five Australian states.Findings– An evaluation framework with seven procurement stages is suggested to describe current state green procurement incentives throughout the delivery lifecycle of road construction projects. The Australian case study was found to provide useful data to identify gaps and strong points of the different states regarding their level of integration of sustainability and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reduction elements in their procurement practices. This understanding was used to draw recommendations on future advancement of green procurement.Originality/value– Government entities across the globe can impact considerably the achievement of sustainability and GHG targets, by using their procurement practices and requirements to create incentives for contractors and suppliers to engage in more GHG conscious practices. The present study provides a systematic account of how green procurement practices can be underpinned using the Australian road construction industry as a case study, and distinguish between strong and weak links in the green procurement chain to draw recommendations for future initiatives.

Understanding factors influencing carbon emissions is important for achieving carbon abatement goals. Traditionally, decomposition approaches, e.g. Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method, are used to uncover factors influencing the change of carbon emissions. This study aims to develop a novel spatio-temporally stratified heterogeneity (STSH) model to better identify, analyze and understand influencing factors of carbon emissions. Compared with LMDI, this model can analyze more independent intensity and quantity factors and reveal the complex interactions between factors. Using China’s construction industry as a case study, the model can successfully identify top influencing factors in the same order of importance similar to LMDI, although a significantly larger number of factors are considered. In the whole construction stage, cement usage, steel usage, completed floor area and construction output value have the highest contributions of 0.599, 0.528, 0.448, 0.446 respectively. In construction and construction-related transportation activities, the top influencing factors are fixed capital assets, construction output value, completed floor area, and electricity usage, with contributions of 0.632, 0.613, 0.599, and 0.597, respectively. The model can also reveal the complex interactions between factors, including bi-variate enhanced interaction and nonlinearly enhanced interaction. The results demonstrate that the model is more useful to evaluate the individual and aggregate impact of a large number of independent factors on carbon emissions when compared with previous models. ; No Full Text

Abstract In Australia, the government spending on public buildings’ energy and water consumption is considerable; however the building energy and water retrofit market potential has been diminished by a number of barriers, especially financial. In contrast, in other advanced economies there are several reported financing strategies that have been shown to accelerate retrofit projects implementation. In this study, a coupled Bayesian Network – System Dynamics model was developed with the core aim to assess the likely influence of those novel financing options and procurement procedures on public building retrofit outcomes scenarios in the Australian context. A particular case-study focusing on Australian public hospitals was showcased as an example in this paper. Stakeholder engagement was utilised to estimate likely preferences and to conceptualise causal relationships of model parameters. The scenario modelling showed that a revolving loan fund supporting an energy performance contracting procurement procedure was preferred. Subsequently, the specific features of this preferred framework were optimised to yield the greatest number of viable retrofit projects over the long term. The results indicated that such a financing scheme would lead to substantial abatement of energy and water consumption, as well as carbon emissions. The strategic scenario analysis approach developed herein provides evidence-based support to policy-makers advocating novel financing and procurement models for addressing a government’s sustainability agenda in a financially responsible and net-positive manner.