Risk and its analysis in the sustainability assessment of the built environment

How to build sustainably is arguably the pre-eminent question of our time. The construction industry and the built environment which it creates have a substantial impact on a range of sustainability issues. Sustainability assessment exists to measure the impacts of sustainability. However, the existing range of assessment methods frequently fails to take risk in the process or the outcome into account. The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to present a generic approach to estimating risks in sustainability assessment for the built environment. This approach defines generic cases of the probability and consequence for risks in sustainability assessment. An outcome matrix has been created to define the severity of each risk based on the associated probability and consequence. Appropriate responses are proposed to then manage the risks. Using the context of sustainability assessment for housing, the specific risks associated with the Ecohomes assessment method are explored. This research demonstrates through applying risk analysis that there are unacceptably severe risks associated with the weighting mechanism, regional differences, fixed parameters and thresholds, the range of coverage of the indicators and the heavy data requirement. However, the analysis demonstrates that there are a number of in-built mechanisms which make Ecohomes resistant to specific risks, and there are also some risks which may not be severe for specific problem situations. The application of risk estimation allows novel insights into the sustainability assessment process and is transferable to other sustainability assessment methods for the built environment