Evaluating the sustainability risk level of public–private partnership (PPP) projects can reduce project risk incidents and achieve the sustainable development of the organization. However, the existing studies about PPP projects risk management mainly focus on exploring the impact of financial and revenue risks but ignore the sustainability risks, causing the concept of “sustainability” to be missing while evaluating the risk level of PPP projects. To evaluate the sustainability risk level and achieve the most important objective of providing a reference for the public and private sectors when making decisions on PPP project management, this paper constructs a factor system of sustainability risk of PPP projects based on an extensive literature review and develops a mathematical model based on the methods of fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model (FCEM) and failure mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) for evaluating the sustainability risk level of PPP projects. In addition, this paper conducts computational experiment based on a questionnaire survey to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of this proposed model. The results suggest that this model is reasonable for evaluating the sustainability risk level of PPP projects. To our knowledge, this paper is the first study to evaluate the sustainability risk of PPP projects, which would not only enrich the theories of project risk management, but also serve as a reference for the public and private sectors for the sustainable planning and development. Keywords: sustainability risk eva

The production of construction projects is carbon-intensive and interrelated to multiple other industries that provide related materials and services. Thus, the calculations of carbon emissions are relatively complex, and the consideration of other factors becomes necessary, especially in China, which has a massive land area and regions with greatly uneven development. To improve the accuracy of the calculations and illustrate the impacts of the various factors at the provincial level in the construction industry, this study separated carbon emissions into two categories, the direct category and the indirect category. The features of carbon emissions in this industry across 30 provinces in China were analysed, and the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) model was employed to decompose the major factors, including direct energy proportion, unit value energy consumption, value creation effect, indirect carbon intensity, and scale effect of output. It was concluded that carbon emissions increased, whereas carbon intensity decreased dramatically, and indirect emissions accounted for 90% to 95% of the total emissions from the majority of the provinces between 2005 and 2014. The carbon intensities were high in the underdeveloped western and central regions, especially in Shanxi, Inner-Mongolia and Qinghai, whereas they were low in the well-developed eastern and southern regions, represented by Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Guangdong. The value creation effect and indirect carbon intensity had significant negative effects on carbon emissions, whereas the scale effect of output was the primary factor creating emissions. The factors of direct energy proportion and unit value energy consumption had relatively limited, albeit varying, effects. Accordingly, this study reveals that the evolving trends of these factors vary in different provinces; therefore, overall, our research results and insights support government policy and decision maker’s decisions to minimize the carbon emissions in the construction industry.

Green buildings have been viewed as one of the most effective solutions to the negative environmental impacts of construction activities. For the sustainable development of the economy and the environment, many governments in the world have launched a variety of policies to encourage the development of green buildings. However, green targets achieved during the operational stage of green buildings are far below the expectations from the design stage. In addition, the development of green buildings is unevenly distributed in different cities. To help resolve these issues, this paper identifies 28 green building influencing factors from two perspectives, the life cycle and stakeholders. Then, a social network analysis is used to analyse their interactions and identify the critical factors. Our results show that government supervision, incremental cost, property management experience, and the awareness of environmental protection in green buildings are the critical influencing factors in promoting green building development. However, some factors related to contractors, designers and suppliers are not as important as perceived. Finally, some policy recommendations are proposed to promote green buildings in China.

The accelerating process of urbanization in China has led to considerable opportunities for the development of construction projects, however, environmental issues have become an important constraint on the implementation of these projects. To quantitatively describe the environmental management capabilities of such projects, this paper proposes a 2-dimensional Environmental Management Maturity Model of Construction Program (EMMMCP) based on an analysis of existing projects, group management theory and a management maturity model. In this model, a synergetic process was included to compensate for the lack of consideration of synergies in previous studies, and it was involved in the construction of the first dimension, i.e., the environmental management index system. The second dimension, i.e., the maturity level of environment management, was then constructed by redefining the hierarchical characteristics of construction program (CP) environmental management maturity. Additionally, a mathematical solution to this proposed model was derived via the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)-entropy approach. To verify the effectiveness and feasibility of this proposed model, a computational experiment was conducted, and the results show that this approach could not only measure the individual levels of different processes, but also achieve the most important objective of providing a reference for stakeholders when making decisions on the environmental management of construction program, which reflects this model is reasonable for evaluating the level of environmental management maturity in CP. To our knowledge, this paper is the first study to evaluate the environmental management maturity levels of CP, which would fill the gap between project program management and environmental management and provide a reference for relevant management personnel to enhance their environmental management capabilities.