A FRAMEWORK FOR MANAGING SUSTAINABILITY KNOWLEDGE, THE C-SAND APPROACH

There has been growing awareness of the importance of sustainable development and sustainable construction around the globe for the last few decades. Sustainable development can be defined as the development, which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own needs. Sustainable construction is the application of sustainable development practices to the construction industry domain. In this field and despite governmental strategies and initiatives, much more has to be done to make construction more sustainable and achieve the targets set for sustainable developments. One of the major obstacles is to capture and manage the knowledge required to improve sustainability in construction. To support this there is a need for a framework to incorporate sustainability issues within the whole construction process including pre- and post- construction phases. After a comprehensive literature review on sustainable development and sustainable construction, the paper presents current practice and perception of sustainability within the industry based on field work conducted as part of the C-SanD Project (Creating, Sustaining, And Disseminating Knowledge For Sustainable Construction: Tools, Methods And Architectures) interviews, with a focus on creating and sharing knowledge for sustainable development and sustainable construction. Finally we present a framework to support the implementation of sustainable construction practices based on a generic design and construction process (Process Protocol).