Abstract
Environmental impact assessment methods suffer from an applicability issue which could impede their use and development. The main subject of this article is to present a method to evaluate the applicability of building environmental assessment method in a given country. Here, when we say that a method is applicable in a given country, it means that it could be widely used and that it could produce the expected effects in terms of energy savings, environmental impact minimization, economic gain, etc. So, for this applicability evaluation purpose, the main criteria that affect the building environmental assessment method applicability were identified and were weighted by studying different scenarios. Then, the evaluation method was applied to the Tunisian case. Moreover, in order to contribute to a better understanding of the importance of building environmental assessment method implementation, stakes related thereto are reviewed. It was reported that building environmental assessment method would concur to improve building energy efficiency, enhance social capital, and contribute to environmental, social, and economic stability. In addition, it could be one of the major solutions for the collection of statistical data, which in turn would contribute to the success of projects undertaken as part of the green economy. Eventually, the building environmental assessment could be one of the major green marketing tools and should be taken into account by a company to improve profitability. The developed method and the presented stakes could be a good management and decision making tools and could help legislators and policy-makers for the best implementation of building environmental assessment method.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Mr. Bruno PEUPORTIER, Professor at the “Ecole des Mines de Paris,” for his participation in the reviewing of this article and for his valuable comments. They also would like to thank the National Agency for Energy Management (ANME) and the National Agency of Environment Protection (ANPE) for their collaboration. Eventually, they thank Ms. Meriem JRADI, former translator at the United Nations, for her helpful linguistic contribution. Finally, they gratefully thank the editor and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments.
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The main idea of the project was formulated by Zainine. All the authors contributed to the study conception and design. The engineering aspect of the paper has been studied by Zainine, Mezni, and Guizani. The economic aspect has been studied by Baeshen and Rahmoun. Data collection was performed by Zainine and Mezni. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Zainine and all the authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zainine, M.A., Mezni, T., Baeshen, Y. et al. The assessment of buildings and constructions sector of economy proposal: an environmental perspective. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 22510–22521 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11876-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11876-9