A multi-criteria decision-making framework for building sustainability assessment in Kazakhstan
Introduction
Nowadays, the building industry remains responsible for 36% of global final energy use, more than a third of worldwide resource utilization, and 12% of all freshwater consumption, consequently contributing to 40% of global solid waste generation and 40% of CO2 emissions (International Energy Agency & United Nations Environment Programme, 2018; Roh, Tae, Suk, Ford, & Shin, 2016; UNEP, 2016). Sustainability in buildings is needed to help in reducing the CO2 emissions and air pollution, to enhance the quality of life and user health, improve and increase productivity and social welfare, create and develop new employment and business opportunities (International Energy Agency & United Nations Environment Programme, 2018; Mahmoud, Zayed, & Fahmy, 2019). Thus, understanding, development, and implementation of building performance assessment methods are considered vital. These methods are an impressive instrument to evaluate and communicate building sustainability and, in the meantime, encouraging engagement and involvement of a wide range of stakeholders.
Generally, building sustainability assessment systems facilitate sustainable construction practices and produce appropriate solutions by emphasizing energy consumption and guide towards various energy management strategies for various applications (Ali & Ali Nsairat, 2009). These methods have been established to produce a suitable program for sustainable energy use and manage environmental issues in the construction process (Haapio & Vietaniemi, 2008). Various studies have looked at the green building certification systems since 1990 that aimed at evaluating environmental and socio-economic, and material and resources impacts of the construction industry (Ali & Ali Nsairat, 2009; Building Research Establishment, 2018; Chen, Yang, & Lu, 2015; LEED, 2019; Li, Chen, Chew, & Teo, 2014).
Development of building sustainability assessment tools started a few decades ago. First building performance assessment method was BREEAM established by the Building Research Establishment of the UK in 1990. Following BREEAM, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) was introduced in the USA between 1993 and 1998. Other institutions in developed countries also started to develop their green standards. In these standards and policies, environmental performance, resource efficiency, and energy issues were prioritized over other dimensions. For instance, in BREEAM weighting scheme, environmental factors such as energy, water, and materials weigh 38% of the total (Building Research Establishment, 2018), while in LEED this number equals to 53% (LEED, 2019). However, in developing countries priorities may vary depending on the national and regional needs and circumstances. According to Gibberd Gibberd (2005), sustainable development in emerging countries should focus on social and economic aspects as a priority, because nations in these countries cannot afford to address environmental performance only. Diamantini and Zanon Diamantini and Zanon (2000) point out the variations in the regions, local conditions, and quality of life, and thus suggest that every action must cope with local conditions, traditions, and attitudes. Zhu and Lin Zhu and Lin (2004) further state about the significant difference between countries in terms of population and building density, particularly, in developing and industrial countries. Haapio Haapio (2012) believes that assessment systems have a strong linkage to their region and they depend on national building codes, regulations, standards, way of living, cultural heritage and building culture. Therefore, in developing countries, local challenges for sustainable building practices which are not the same as for developed countries should be determined before implementing and adopting the sustainable assessment strategies (Fawzi, Ameen, & Mourshed, 2019).
In Kazakhstan, the building sector, including residential and commercial buildings, accounts for 30% of final energy consumption (Kazakhstan Statistics Agency, 2018). Therefore, an application of sustainability principles to buildings can be an effective approach to address environmental issues to decrease the building impacts on the environment (Balaban & Puppim de Oliveira, 2017). Kazakhstan has significant renewable potential from solar, wind, hydro and biomass. Despite this, the amounts of alternative energy sources used in the country are very small (Marat & Michele, 2016). Renewable sources such as wind, solar, small hydro and bioenergy currently contribute less than 1% of the country's energy mix (Karatayev & Clarke, 2014). Using renewable sources for energy production plays an important role in achieving sustainable development. Thus, to implement sustainability practices in the developing countries, incorporation of assessment criteria in the construction process should be similar to the developed countries experience (Balaban & Puppim de Oliveira, 2017; Zarghami et al., 2018).
In building sustainability assessment methods, assessment criteria and assessment indicators are important items by which the success and failure of the assessment method can be judged (Haapio, 2012). Assessment indicators are substantial elements through which information is communicated to the public and decision-makers. Besides, indicators assist to promote decision making by converting gathered data into feasible units of information (Häkkinen, 2007). Thus, in building performance assessment tools, assessment criteria and indicators are developed and designed first, and then evolved into weighting-based decision framework using Multi-criteria decision- making methods (MCDM). Some of the most widely used MCDM methods such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) (Ali & Ali Nsairat, 2009; Atanda, 2019; Banani et al., 2016; Shad, Khorrami, & Ghaemi, 2017); Fuzzy-AHP (Zarghami et al., 2018; Zarghami, Fatourehchi, & Karamloo, 2019) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) (Mahmoud, Zayed, & Fahmy, 2019) have been successfully experienced for weighting the building sustainability assessment criteria. It is commonly assumed that in multi-criteria decision making, there are no better or worse techniques, but some techniques better fit than others to particular decision problems (Haralambopoulos & Polatidis, 2003).
In this regard, this study proposes to use Step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) technique to weight the assessment items of a multi-criteria assessment framework. SWARA technique is relatively new and has been successfully applied for selecting the rational dispute resolution (Keršuliene, Zavadskas, & Turskis, 2010), architect selection (Keršuliene˙ & Turskis, 2011), machine tool selection (Aghdaie, Hashemkhani, & Zavadskas, 2013), shopping mall locating (Hashemkhani et al., 2013), copper prospectivity mapping (Panahi, Khakzad, & Afzal, 2017) and prioritizing energy system sustainability assessment indicators (Zolfani & Saparauskas, 2013). However, to date, there has not been any application of SWARA in weighting whole building sustainability assessment categories and indicators. In this technique, experts have a crucial role on weights evaluation and calculation perspective of this technique is different from other similar methods, and SWARA allows policy and decision-makers to select their priority based on the current situation of society, environment, and economy (Zolfani & Saparauskas, 2013).
This paper presents the third phase of the research on Building Information Modeling (BIM) based Kazakhstan Building Sustainability Assessment Framework (KBSAF) development, which aimed at weighing the assessment categories and indicators using SWARA technique.
The sections of the paper are organized as follows. Section 2 presents the information related to the sustainable building development in Kazakhstan. The research methodology used in this study, including the SWARA technique and expert selection process is presented in Section 3. Section 4 provides a discussion of the results of the study. The paper follows in Section 5 on validation of the accuracy of the proposed assessment framework through the comparison with existing well-established tools. Finally, concluding remarks and contribution of the research are presented at the end of the paper.
Section snippets
Concept of sustainable building development in Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan is presently one of the fastest evolving developing countries in the Central Asia. It is steadily growing in all sectors of its economy which are extremely reliant on conventional energy sources such as coal, oil, and gas. As a result of an enormous amount of energy consumption, Kazakhstan generates substantial amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is the largest GHG emitter in the Central Asia with annual emissions of 246 Mt CO2 in 2018 (Enerdata Energy Statistical Yearbook,
Methodology
This study reports the part of the large project on the development of BIM based Building Sustainability Assessment Framework in Kazakhstan. The research includes the different analytical and experimental investigation phases as provided in Fig. 1. Phase three is presented in this paper while first and second phases are briefly explained and fourth phase is the future proposed work in this research project. The results of first and second phase are shown as categories and indicators in Table 3
Results and discussion
In this section, we focus on the results of calculations based on the SWARA technique. SWARA was adopted as an MCDM tool to reach consensus by an experts' group to extract criteria weights in the assessment framework. Table 2 represents the criteria weights’ results for all nine main categories. The results of the weights of assessment categories and indicators are presented in Table 3 and show that the Indoor environmental quality and Building architectural planning solutions quality category
Comparison of KBSAF with the existing assessment systems
This section focuses on the validation of the proposed building sustainability assessment tool through comparison with the existing assessment methods, such as LEED, BREEAM, CASBEE, and SBTool. Besides, the proposed system was compared with assessment tools such as the Saudi Non-Residential Sustainable Buildings Assessment (Banani et al., 2016) and Iranian Green Building Assessment tool (IGBT) developed recently by Shad et al. Shad et al. (2017) for office buildings. These tools were selected
Conclusions
The research presented the third phase of the research project on development of BIM-based building sustainability assessment framework in Kazakhstan. The main goal of this paper was to allocate weights to the main categories and indicators to develop the building sustainability assessment framework. In this regard, SWARA method was used to calculate and extract weights of assessment criteria.
The main contributions of the research are the identification and development of assessment categories
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of Nazarbayev University Individual Grant #430-2019 and the Ph.D. Scholarship of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
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