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Recent reports based on the sustainable development goals (SDGs) have revealed that no country is in line with achieving the targets of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, with the slowest progress being witnessed mainly on goals that are focused on the environment. This study examines environmental performance indicators for assessing the sustainability of building projects.

The study uses an explanatory sequential design with an initial quantitative instrument phase, followed by a qualitative data collection phase. An extensive critical comparative review of the literature resulted in the identification of ten environmental sustainability indicators. One hundred and sixty-seven questionnaire responses based upon these indicators from the Ghanaian construction industry were received. Data were coded with SPSS v22, analysed descriptively, and via inferential analysis. These data were then validated through semi-structured interviews with six interviewees who are fellows of their respective professional bodies, a senior academic (professor in construction project delivery) and a government official. Data obtained from the semi-structured validation interviews were analysed through the side-by-side comparison of the qualitative data with the quantitative data.

The findings from the study suggest that all the indicators were important in assessing building projects' environmental sustainability across the entire life cycle. Key among the identified indicators is the effects of the project on “water quality, air quality, energy use and conservation, and environmental compliance and management”. The interviewees further agreed to and confirmed the importance of these identified indicators for assessing the environmental sustainability of building projects in Ghana.

Compared to existing studies, this study adopts the exploratory sequential design to identify and examine the critical indicators in assessing the environmental sustainability across the entire lifecycle of building projects in a typical developing country setting, i.e. Ghana. It reveals areas of prime concern in the drive to place the local construction industry on a trajectory towards achieving environmental sustainability.

This paper aims to analyse the impact of various climate change indicators on economic growth while further scrutinising the overall efficiency of environmental policies adopted at the European Union (EU) level. The paper considers the European Green Deal policy framework as a prism for assessing whether an increase in environmental expenditure mitigates climate change.

Given the duality of the study, this paper examines the immediate impact of climate change on economic growth by using multiple linear regression and evaluates the effectiveness of environmental policies through a multiple indicators multiple cause (MIMIC) Model. As the paper assesses the policy efficiency in EU countries, this paper has used various climate and economic-related indicators from all 27 EU member states for a period of 12 years (2010–2021).

The results suggest that the macroeconomic environment is indeed impacted by climate change mechanisms, particularly through industrial activity that leads to pollution and resource depletion. Furthermore, through the MIMIC model approach, the results display that environmental expenditures have also diminished the risks associated with climate change indicators, especially in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This paper provides a clear overview of the manner in which climate change risks affect economic growth and, in turn, how EU countries are mitigating such risks. It proposes a traditional yet controversial method for assessing the correlation between indicators and corresponding causes whilst also considering various indicators to explain the means through which the EU Commission had applied its adopted environmental policies to mitigate environmental risks.

This paper aims to propose and assess a core set of environmental and operational sustainability indicators for airport benchmarking, based on research conducted for a decision support tool designed to support airport environmental and operational sustainability. Seeks to make recommendations on the external use of sustainability indicators in stakeholder communication, based on a separate survey of the way in which UK airports use environmental and sustainability benchmarking reports.

The indicators are designed to minimise additional data collection demands while reflecting sustainability theory to a practicable extent.

Bringing core environmental and operational indicators together helps to make their inter‐relationship explicit. The indicators are a minimum set, and their limitations with respect to sustainability are made explicit.

Reports on a survey of the current extent of, and approaches to, stakeholder communication undertaken by airports in the UK, particularly external use of environmental and sustainability benchmarking results.

Companies need to excel in many areas to achieve a competitive advantage. This, together with pressure imposed by regulators and customers regarding sustainability concerns, leads companies to address sustainability in an integrated fashion across all management processes. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a model for the assessment of the environmental performance of a supply chain, based on four perspectives used in the balanced scorecard. Performance indicators are proposed based on the literature, as well as on the ISO 14031 and GRI standards, and were validated by a panel of experts.

Based on a literature review on models for environmental performance management a novel model to assess the environmental performance of the supply chains (Env_BSC_4_SCPM) is proposed. Data collected from the first tier suppliers of an automotive industry case study are used to test the proposed model.

The model developed was tested in a case study company, showing it ability to benchmark the company first tiers suppliers and products. The model is also useful as a decision support tool to define actions to be taken in order to improve the global environment performance of the supply chain.

The proposed model was developed to evaluate the environmental performance of supply chains. Nevertheless, the case study only takes account of the first tier suppliers, due to difficulties associated to data collecting for the other elements in the supply chain. Widening the frontiers, the next phase may include the application of this model to second, third and lower tier suppliers, as well as the final customer. Improvements in the model could also include the construction of a composite index to measure the environmental supply chain performance.

The paper provides a model that can be used by practitioners to evaluate the environmental performance of their supply chain and to decide on actions to be taken to improve it.

As stated by several authors, there has been limited research conducted in the field of environmental evaluation of supply chains. This paper proposes a novel model for the environmental performance of the supply chain and tests it using industrial empirical data.

The purpose of this paper is to examine why and how municipal managers and CEOs for municipally owned companies use the environmental performance indicators.

A case study approach as a research design was used. In total, 18 semi-structured interviews were conducted among managers for administrative departments and municipal company CEOs.

This study found that the environmental performance indicators are used by department managers mainly for resource allocation, control and for teaching the employees. The CEOs of the municipal companies use the environmental indicators for communicating with external stakeholders and see the indicators primarily as marketing tools. The main reason why the environmental performance indicators are used in the municipality can be the strong demand from the local politicians to push the “green agenda,” and therefore the managers have to comply.

As in any case study, generalizations from the research should be made with care, but since this is only one municipality, further research is needed to find additional evidence.

The findings of this study have a number of implications for future practice, and it is worth mentioning that clear guidelines for how the information could be made more useful for managers at the managerial level in Växjö municipality (VM) are requested for both the municipal managers and the CEOs.

Overall, this study strengthens the idea that environmental performance indicators could be used to a larger extent for communicating with external stakeholders both for municipal departments and companies.

The research adds to the literature by examining different patterns of using environmental performance indicators in a unique setting – in VM, which is called “the greenest city in Europe” and is one of the “pioneers” in environmental work and extensively uses performance indicators.

The aim of the paper is to propose a method that may assist organisations in the task of selecting appropriate indicators for their environmental performance evaluation procedures.

The proposed method is based on the principles of risk assessment, a key technique in the protection and management of the environment. When well‐constructed, it may cover all aspects of an organisation's activities, thus providing a sound base for the identification of the most significant indicators to be considered for the environmental performance evaluation.

The proposed approach starts from an initial set of numerous indicators. Each indicator is identified in order to monitor and assess the progress towards the achievement of a goal that has been set in relation to a particular environmental aspect of the activities of the considered organisation. For each indicator, a related environmental risk is assessed that may then be used to prioritise the indicators, and identify the most significant ones as far as the environmental aspects of the considered organisation are concerned.

Despite the fact that the environmental performance evaluation has been considered to be both significant and useful, the approaches proposed, so far, are very generic and do not provide actual assistance to the organisations that wish to adopt and apply such procedures. The main advantage of the proposed methodology lies exactly at this point. It facilitates the process of environmental performance evaluation providing substantial assistance to one of the most important stages that is to decide which particular indicators will be considered.

As one of the buzzwords in the present age with considerable impacts in tertiary institutions, social media use in online teaching, learning and information dissemination have been extensively discussed in extant literature. This paper aims to explore the existing campus sustainability appraisal (CSA) tools to identify the length at which social media has been used, especially in environmental sustainability indicators’ selection and empirical verification.

The methodology is mainly based on a desktop study involving comprehensive review and content analysis of existing CSA tools’ documents. Webpage content analysis of selected sustainability monitoring and tracking system in higher education institutions was also conducted.

The tools' content analysis reveals insufficient utilization of social media data and platforms in campus sustainability environmental-dimension indicators selection. To bridge this identified research gap, social media user-generated content for appraising the campus-wide environmental sustainability indicators preference in tertiary institutions was proposed.

The adoption and modification of this study’s proposed approach by tertiary institutions, especially in sub-Saharan African countries, could help address most campus-wide environmental challenges raised, commented on and discussed on social media.

This study contributes to knowledge gaps by revealing the extent of social media utilization in extant tools. With the expanding utilization of different social media platforms by various tertiary institutions worldwide, their administrators' responsibility is to put these social media data into fair use.

The aim of this research is to develop a model for environmental management from which quantifiable indication of overall environmental performance for an organisation may be derived.

The links between environmental performance and financial performance are considered. Several research methods are described which consider pollution performance. However, it is clear that no single method wholly reflects quantitative pollution management (QPM). The initial model for QPM is derived, and the weightings that should be allocated for the individual and combined categories in achieving the indicator of pollution performance are established.

The paper establishes a methodology for the derivation of a QPM indicator that provides a numeric variable, by using numerical values that have been obtained from a set of linguistic values evaluated against determinations of prescribed events. The robust nature of the developed QPM indicator is provided by means of a prescribed methodology where the outcome indicator is constructed from the results of the audit and the inter‐relationship of the individual components. This inter‐relationship of numeric and linguistic variables encourages the use of modified set theory in which an individual could have a degree of membership ranged over a continuum of values.

The development of a quantifiable pollution indicator enables customers/consumers to make a purchase decision that takes into account environmental concerns. These unique QPM indicators will assist in promoting a sustainable management strategy with preventative approaches to pollution. Under these circumstances, a QPM indicator would allow industrial and regulatory strategies to be implemented beyond the traditional boundaries of pollution control and waste management. It would give a broader perspective on performance, and encourage application of preventive technologies to reduce pollutant and waste loads, while also promoting environment‐friendly products and services through openly available quantitative indicators. The derived indicator will be limited to the state of a particular process at a given point in time, and as such will need recalculation over given time intervals. This methodology enables the organisation to demonstrate improvement, if applicable. Monitoring tools should in any case be an aid to strategy formulation, not a determinant of it.

This study will assist in allowing environmental performance to become a strategic factor in business planning. Direct comparisons may be made between the operational characteristics of organisations, and how those organisations impact on the environment via pollution, providing direct business benefits to organisations that manage their business and protect the environment.

Sustainable construction deficits are common in developing economies, and resolutions are constrained by the failure to prioritise the plethora of available indicators. This study aims to report on overlapping indicators for benchmarking sustainable construction for construction organisations.

Online survey data were collected from construction professionals, academics and senior managers in government bodies. Pearson chi-squared tests and overlapping analysis were used to determine significant indicators. Kruskal–Wallis tests were used to determine statistically significant differences among the dimensions.

Overlapping analysis determined indicators significant for economic, environmental and social performance. Environmental protection and reporting (pollution and emissions) were significant for all three performance dimensions. The most significant indicators are economic performance (adequate competence of key project staff), environmental performance (environmental protection and reporting – pollution and emissions) and social performance (adequate sustainability expenditure by construction organisations). Significant differences due to dimensions existed for adequate competence of key project staff, sustainable construction and eco-design, adequate governance and organisational excellence of construction projects and satisfactory workers’ morale.

Determining overlapping indicators enables prioritised implementation that ensures sustainable construction. Excluding construction workers was a significant limitation for a holistic interrogation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to determine overlapping indicators for sustainable construction performance in Zimbabwe.