Optimizing the benefits of integrating green practices into infrastructure asset management through a fuzzy synthetic evaluation
As environmental problems intensify in the construction industry, such as climate change, resource depletion and urbanization, green building practices offer great potential to buffer these concerns. This study aims to investigate the benefits of integrating green practices (GP) into infrastructure asset management (IAM) in the construction industry. This study adopted a quantitative research approach and addressed the knowledge gap through a cross-sectional survey of 112 construction practitioners. Factor analysis, mean score ranking and fuzzy synthetic evaluation were the analysis techniques adopted for this study. The results reveal significant benefits such as reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, reduction of urban heat island effect and improvement in indoor environmental quality, among others. Exploratory factor analysis extracted six principal components, accounting for 75.079% of the cumulative variance. Overall, the results indicate that, integrating GP into IAM has enormous benefits that impact the environmental, economic and social sustainability of built assets. This study highlights the critical role of multistakeholder collaboration to maximize the environmental and economic gains of integrating GP into infrastructure management. The results of this study bring to the fore a relatively unexplored area in the sustainability research – it provides a prioritized, quantifiable framework of benefits tailored toward developing countries.