The construction of maritime infrastructure, such as waterways and seaports, often require large-scale dredging processes. These processes are often both energy-intensive, using various fuels and emit considerable amounts of greenhouse gases such as CO2. Studies on road infrastructure have introduced and successfully implemented a number of sophisticated approaches for assessing and reducing energy use and associated CO2 emissions at a project level. However, research on maritime infrastructure construction has primarily focused on dredging at an equipment level despite the promising opportunities of assessing and reducing the climate impact at a project level. This study proposes a workflow for assessing the energy use and associated CO2 emissions of maritime infrastructure projects and demonstrates its use in a case study. The case study shows that these types of assessments are possible to conduct which also implies that alternative scenarios, such as different material uses, equipment or design choices can be compared. In practical terms project managers can benefit from such assessments and comparisons to lower the overall climate impact of their maritime infrastructure projects.

The European building stock was renewed at a rapid pace during the period 1950-1975. In many European countries, the building stock from this time needs to be renovated, and there are opportunities to introduce energy efficiency measures in the renovation process. Information availability and increasingly available analysis tools make it possible to assess the impact of policy and regulation. This article describes methods developed for analyzing investments in renovation and energy performance based on building ownership and inhabitant socio-economic information developed for Swedish authorities, to be used for the Swedish national renovations strategy in 2019. This was done by analyzing measured energy usage and renovation investments made during the last 30 years, coupled with building specific official information of buildings and resident area characteristics, for multi-family dwellings in Gothenburg (N = 6319). The statistical analyses show that more costly renovations lead to decreasing energy usage for heating, but buildings that have been renovated during the last decades have a higher energy usage when accounting for current heating system, ownership, and resident socio-economic background. It is appropriate to include an affordability aspect in larger renovation projects since economically disadvantaged groups are over-represented in buildings with poorer energy performance.

Despite many studies focusing on assessing energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in road projects, limited attention has been given to practical methods for mitigating environmental impacts at the project planning stage. Our study addresses this issue by proposing a model incorporating a step-by-step guide for calculating carbon dioxide emissions in the project. This model is practically applied to a road construction project where two major supply chain alternatives are evaluated and compared. The findings suggest that major reductions of carbon dioxide emissions can be achieved by (1) identifying and comparing a set of realistic project alternatives, and (2) conducting this at an early stage of the project planning process so that favorable alternatives can be implemented during construction.

Many studies have highlighted the importance of retrofitting to mitigate the energy use of building stocks. An important step in the development of renovation strategy and energy conservation advising is to gather information of the energy performance of the existing buildings. However, renovation strategies must also consider the socio-economic challenges associated with the cost of energy retrofitting. This paper describes the development of an energy atlas of the multifamily building stock in Sweden for visualizing and analyzing energy use and renovation needs. The atlas has been developed using Extract Transform and Load technology (ETL) to aggregate information on the energy performance, building ownership, renovation status, and socio-economic status of inhabitants from various data sources. The atlas can visualize the energy use and renovation status of multifamily buildings in 2D maps and 3D models, displaying data for either individual buildings or aggregated data on spatial scales ranging from 250 × 250 m squares through district and municipality to county areas. A demonstration of its use on national and city scales indicates that energy retrofits of multifamily buildings reaching a service life of 50 years can reduce the energy use of the existing building stock by up to 50% relative to 1990. However, costs associated with renovation and energy retrofits of multifamily buildings can be problematic, especially in economically weak suburbs. A good understanding of past and future renovation needs and socio-economic consequences is important in the development of a sustainable national renovation strategy.

Road projects generally begin with broad investigations and progressively advance towards more detailed and immediate issues. Road corridors, which represent rough locations of alternative road alignments, are usually identified, evaluated and compared in early planning stages. Commonly at this stage, costs estimates of the identified road alignment are made whereas their environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, often are insufficiently accounted for. GHG emissions caused by the construction process are frequently ignored altogether. Despite indications that benefits of decisions and measures can be considerably higher if implemented in early planning stages, much emphasis is put on later stages. Our study presents an approach for estimating project-based GHG emissions of alternative alignments in early planning stages. The findings indicate that if adopted in the planning process, the approach can support projects in reducing their GHG emissions.

The planning, construction, management and use of our built environment are affected by diverse social, economic and environmental factors. Sustainable urban development is dependent on the understanding of the complex relations between the built environment, the social activities that take place over time and the interaction with the natural environment. The challenge to understand urban systems on both the local and global scale has inspired researchers and national agencies to develop sustainability indicators to support the planning, construction, management and use of the built environment. Access to open data of our built environment in national, regional and local databases opens new possibilities to generate models of our urban systems to facilitate visualization and analysis of indicators in order to enhance awareness of sustainability dimensions. Here spatial Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) technologies can be used in combination with Geographic Information system GIS to manage data sets from multiple sources in different formats. The purpose of this research is to investigate how spatial ETL technologies can be used to develop models in order to analyse and visualize the performance of urban systems. The applied method is grounded in system development and based on an abductive research approach that was repeated in six studies. Three of the studies deal with the relocation of Kiruna where models of the city was created and used to investigate the impact of mining subsidence on energy supply, infrastructure and buildings. The fourth case investigates the selection of insulation material on the embedded energy in a passive house in Kiruna. In the fifth case an urban model of the twin towns Malmberget/Gällivare was created to explore and relate data on attitudes from a survey to public data on population, infrastructure and built environment. The final case is the development of an energy atlas containing 90% of the multifamily building stock in Sweden. The atlas combines the energy performance and renovation status of multifamily buildings with public data of ownership, income of residents etc. for individual buildings in 3D models or aggregated on spatial scales ranging from 250x250 m squares through district and municipality to county areas in Sweden. The result shows that multiple sources in different formats, both standardized and non-standardized, can be utilized in the extraction of information for the purpose of developing urban performance models. The Swedish high-resolution LiDAR digital height model together property information makes it possible to represent the built environment by extruded footprints to give a 3D representation of all urban areas in Sweden (Level-Of-Detail 1). In combination with performance data (e.g. energy use, renovation status or result from surveys) urban performance GIS models can be created and visualized in applications (such as Google Earth, 3D pdf) to support decision-making on both individual and institutional level. The automation of the process to develop performance models offers a method for customizing information deliveries on the fly using original data sources according to defined requirements. The flexibility and customization are kept in the process rather than in the delivered model. This makes it easier to keep the performance model up to date. For the management of large performance models, e.g. the example of the national energy atlas, a staging phase was added in the automation process, in order to reduce the processing time.

Assessment of the embodied energy associated with the production and transportation of materials during the design phase of building provides great potential to profoundly affect the building’s energy use and sustainability performance. While Building Information Modeling (BIM) gives opportunities to incorporate sustainability performance indicators in the building design process, it lacks interoperability with the conventional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools used to analyse the environmental footprints of materials in building design. Additionally, many LCA tools use databases based on industry-average values and thus cannot account for differences in the embodied impacts of specific materials from individual suppliers. To address these issues, this paper presents a framework that supports design decisions and enables assessment of the embodied energy associated with building materials supply chain based on suppliers’ Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). The framework also integrates Extract Transform Load (ETL) technology into the BIM to ensure BIM-LCA interoperability, enabling an automated or semi-automated assessment process. The applicability of the framework is tested by developing a prototype and using it in a case study, which shows that a building’s energy use and carbon footprint can be significantly reduced during the design phase by accounting the impact of individual material in the supply chain.

Enhanced dissemination of information regarding energy saving and climate change targeted toward property owners is considered to be an important strategy in order to reach the Swedish national target of energy efficiency in the building sector by 2050. Here the municipality energy advisors and the national register for energy performance certificates can facilitate the mitigation of energy use in the building stock. So far few studies have focused on the practical road map to the national target of energy use on the city/district level and to the communication aspects with stakeholders in the creation of energy city models.In this paper a city energy model is developed based on the requests and need for visualization from a group of energy advisors. Six different scenarios are studied in order to analyze the possibility of reaching the energy targets specified by the government in the town of Kiruna. The results show that: (1) it is possible to automatically create city energy models using extract, transform and load tools based on spatial and non-spatial data from national registers and databases; (2) city energy models improve the understanding of energy use in buildings and can therefore be a valuable tool for energy advisors, real estate companies and urban planners. The case study of Kiruna showed that the proposed energy saving measures in the energy performance certificates need to be implemented and new buildings in the urban transformation must be of high energy standard in order to reach the national target in Kiruna.

Complex road projects, particularly near sensitive locations, often have substantial effects on humans and theenvironment caused by construction, production processes and the use phase. Before a road alignment isdetermined, several road corridors are identified and evaluated during early planning stages. Oftentimes thisevaluation focuses on impacts of the finished road whereas construction and production processes frequently areignored, risking viable corridors to be discarded before having been sufficiently evaluated. Existing IT-systemsenables modeling of relevant aspects such as road corridors, noise, pollution, production and construction, butthere is often a lack of interoperability between these systems. Interoperability problems can be faced withExtract Transform Load (ETL) tools but this has not been adequately examined regarding infrastructure projects.Our study presents a novel method for evaluating road corridors that includes production aspects, which arevisualized and analyzed in 3D. By using ETL technology to handle interoperability problems, existing tools forroad corridor planning, production planning and 3D visualization are used to demonstrate the method. Thefindings indicate that large scale production aspects related to road corridors can be modeled, analyzed andvisualized in 3D, which can benefit stakeholders in making decisions.

Social sustainability is a widely used concept in urban planning research and practice. However, knowledge of spatial distributions of social values and aspects of social sustainability is required. Visualization of these distributions is also highly valuable, but challenging, and rarely attempted in sparsely populated urban environments in rural areas. This article presents a method that highlights social values in spatial models through 3D visualization, describes the methodology to generate the models, and discusses potential applications. The models were created using survey, building, infrastructure and demographic data for Gällivare, Sweden, a small city facing major transformation due to mining subsidence. It provides an example of how 3D models of important social sustainability indices can be designed to display citizens’ attitudes regarding their financial status, the built environment, social inclusion and welfare services. The models helped identify spatial variations in perceptions of the built environment that correlate (inter alia) with closeness to certain locations, gender and distances to public buildings. Potential uses of the model for supporting efforts by practitioners, researchers and citizens to visualize and understand social values in similar urban environments are discussed, together with ethical issues (particularly regarding degrees of anonymity) concerning its wider use for inclusive planning.