The Effects Of Climate Change On The Environment

By undertaking an analysis an innovative, perceivably environmentally sustainable building (before analysis) through a Life Cycle Assessment, the author aims to scientifically investigate whether or not environmental sustainability is becoming more central to the design process, and if there are reasons to be optimistic.

The studies of Earth have shown that in the last hundred years, the temperature has gone up one degree Fahrenheit. Even just one degree can make a big difference to the Earth’s natural form. The warming of the Earth has caused the snow and ice to melt much faster and the ocean levels to rise. In the next hundred years the effects will be more severe.

With the increasing popularity of sustainable construction, the need of life cycle cost analysis will become imperative in the future. Sustainable construction is a way of responsibly creating and managing a healthy

The built environment as a whole is said to contribute about half the greenhouse gas emissions in the world (UNEF 2007). Specifically, considering the less studied area of construction emissions, research shows that this component accounts for as much as 11.7% of emissions inclusive of direct and indirect emissions (Acquaye & Duffy 2010). As such it has significant impact on the environment and represents a major opportunity to study potential reductions.

Various new legislations from UK Government and EU standards have been raised for lower energy consumption and lower greenhouse gas emissions to meet stated demands. Up until now the construction industry has been introducing new products in order to meet the lower energy targets. Also the technological developments has given the opportunity to the manufacturers to produce highly efficient heat emitters. These will help reduce overall energy consumption and also will help to achieve a reduced carbon emission. In the UK, Domestic heating contributes to around 20% of total carbon emissions. (J Douglas 2015,p4)

Over the past few decades, the world has rapidly deteriorated in terms of the environment. There are numerous factors that contribute to the deterioration of the earth and one significant factor is due to the issues of climate change. Majority of environmental as well as social scientist that cares about the world defines climate change as the primary source of global risk since it could have severe impacts on the future generations. In addition, the general meaning of the term ‘climate change’ is defined as the change in regional or global climate patterns and it is mainly caused by human activities such as deforestation and emission of harmful gases that pollutes the environment. The future generations are affected in a way that survivability in the world would be tougher and lifestyle would be different compared to the present. In the following essay, climate change will be discussed by relating it to the issue of sustainable development as well as identifying several implications of a continued “Business as Usual” approach and concluding by providing several objectives and alternatives to improve sustainability of the world.

Building 's trigger large amounts of CO2, causing them to consequently contribute a vast majority of the energy consumption worldwide , however new advanced design strategies and sustainable technologies can be incorporated into existing/new building 's in order to decrease emissions, mitigating long-term impacts and adapt to short-term to the

Use phase of the building is the largest stage that impacts environment during the life cycle, so require more attention in the field of energy saving of building. In the initial design stage of buildings, through LCA can help design decisions, such as the appropriate use of zero energy building techniques. To quantitatively assess the energy consumption and environmental impact among all above stages, LCA is undoubtedly the best choice that can full evaluate the impacts during extraction of raw materials, material creation, sale, maintenance, disposal or recycling, also global warming, air pollution, water pollution and other index. Thereby more effectively improving environmental performance is to achieve green building. LCA will provide

Li and Chen (2017) introduced an approach to calculate the carbon emissions during the construction stage. They utilized the segregation-integration method to calculate the greenhouse gases of each construction process. They concluded that the construction emissions represenst 9% of the total emissions and the carbon emissions of the construction stage of a commercial bilding is 54.18 kg/m2. Sandanayake et al. (2016) presented a methodology that helps decision makers to reduce the direct emissions during the construction phase. They illustrated that materials, equipment usage, and transportation contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions by 77.13%, 13.53%, and 9.34%, respectively. They highlighted that excavators and concete pumps contribute significantly in the greenhouse gase emissions.

The greenhouse gases footprint produced from construction process (〖Eghg〗^c) and transportation (〖Eghg〗^t) process is calculated using the Equations 5 and 6.

Use phase of building is the largest stage that impacts environment during the life cycle, so require more attention in the field of energy saving of building. In the initial design stage of buildings, through LCA can help design decisions, such as the appropriate use of zero energy building techniques. To quantitatively assess the energy consumption and environmental impact among all above stages, LCA is undoubtedly the best choice that can full evaluate the impacts during extraction of raw materials, material creation, sale, maintenance, disposal or recycling, also global warming, air pollution, water pollution and other index. Thereby more effectively improving environmental performance is to achieve green building. LCA will provide the support of data on saving water, energy, material and other indicators. Based on LCA gradually promote the use of the Environment Product Declaration (EPD), this declaration will serve as a business and marketing communication product sustainability information, greatly enhance the green building(products) influence in the consumers. In today with increasing serious energy and environmental issues, using green building instead of traditional high-energy building has become a trend. Life cycle thinking and ways can facilitate the development of the green building process, and help us to make more environmentally friendly choices for building design and material selection, especially as consumers we need to follow.

The sustainability of construction materials is a huge topic in today’s world of engineering. Finding a way to improve the efficiency, costs, and environmental impact of construction is a key discussion topic. When it comes to structural steel being used today, our society is pushing towards the use of “green” steel. This term is used to represent the life cycle of steel as well as the production of structural steel. While most construction materials differ significantly from one another, structural steel is manufactured from recycled materials, but only at a limited number of locations. Another important aspect of green steel is the cradle-to-cradle process that it goes through. The cradle-to-cradle

Estimation of emissions at construction phase is one of the most complicated tasks when performing an emission study on a building (Guggemos and Horvath, 2005, Junnila et al., 2006a). This is due to the uniqueness of construction activities and associated methods from project to project. Unavailability of quality data and inventories and time consuming nature of data collection are some of the other reasons that emissions at construction phase is given less consideration.

Deforestation is believed to be another major cause of global warming. The cutting and burning of about 34 million acres of trees each year resulted in an increase of 25% carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere Ismail et al. (2010). Environmental pollution is becoming more common in the urban areas and has produced many negative environmental impacts to society. One of the effects is an urban heat island phenomenon in which the temperature in urban areas is higher than the surrounding area. Climate change not only gives impact to the environment but also to the natural heating and cooling processes of buildings. The warmer outside temperature will affect the indoor temperature and thermal comfort of buildings. When the outdoor air temperature increases, buildings will experience indoor discomfort and this situation will lead to a higher demand for mechanical ventilation and increased energy consumption in buildings. Various studies have shown that passive and low energy cooling are the most preferred techniques used to minimise the solar load and conductive daytime heat gain through the building.

Concrete is the most commonly used material on earth apart from water. The main reasons for such a wide use are the performance benefits that include durability, robustness, thermal mass, acoustic performance and flood resilience. The amount of concrete used annually is equal to about 2.8 billion tons in 2008. Thus, the concrete industry is one of the main contributors to the total CO2 emission of the world. Cement, the principal component for production of concrete, manufacturing amounts to approximately 7% of the total CO2 emission in 2007 globally. However, carbonation reaction that occurs in concrete with age reabsorbs CO2 released during calcination. Therefore, the main focus of reduction in emission during cement production is by reducing the energy use or the amount of cement used in the manufacturing. Moreover, the advantage of concrete is that it is locally produced; as well as all its primary components are universally available. Apart from that, concrete can last longer than other construction material and has low maintenance and long service life. Thus, conserves a lot of energy resulting in a very less CO2 emission if measured according to Full Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The main problem with manufacturing of concrete apart from cement usage is the large quantities of gravel, sand and water are used that has considerable ecological effects. The use of concrete will increase in coming years as large number of developing countries began to