Key Portfolio Selection Criteria for Sustainable Construction

Selecting the best projects and programs is of paramount importance to the success of organizations in the construction industry for the employer, clients, and developers. The existing selection criteria in the literature are tailored toward traditional construction projects. However, with the current move toward sustainable construction, there is a need to incorporate sustainability-specific criteria in the process portfolio selection. This study aims to identify and evaluate the sustainability-specific project selection criteria for construction organizations from the client’s perspective; this research topic is significant because developers/clients do not always consider sustainability criteria when selecting their portfolio of projects. The research methodology of this study consists of a literature review, identifying the sustainability criteria into an integrated list, and a survey to weight and rank the criteria. Sixteen criteria were identified through an extensive review of the related literature. These criteria were categorized based on three sustainability pillars: environmental, social, and economic. The environmental pillar includes six selection criteria, which are energy use, material use, water use, land use, pollution, and waste management. The social pillar consists of five selection criteria, which include health and safety, employee training and education, improvement in infrastructure, relation with local communities, and alternative transportation. The economic pillar consists of five selection criteria, which include life cycle cost, contribution to GDP, employment creation, innovation and technology, and use of national suppliers. A survey was developed and circulated to specialists in the construction industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The weights for the sustainability selection criteria were assessed by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The results show that the environmental group is the most important group among the pillars of sustainability, with a weight of 0.520, compared with the social and the economic pillars, which had weights of 0.214 and 0.266, respectively.