In order to create sustainable lifestyles and societies in the long term, sustainability goals must be balanced in terms of the environment, the economy and society. However, these targets are sometimes in conflict with each other and cannot be balanced without compromise. Today, the sustainability debate focuses primarily on balancing environmental/climate and economic targets. Social aspects tend to play a marginal role in the debate. This is also the case in the construction industry, which contributes significantly to global energy consumption and high grey and operational CO2 emissions worldwide. For this reason, research and politics have focused intensively in recent decades on ways to reduce climate emissions while maintaining economic efficiency. Historically, the focus in construction has been on structural safety. The classic credo in engineering was ‘more is more’. In the context of the climate debate, however, ‘less is more’ often applies, so that engineers and architects today face an economic conflict of objectives between the classic requirements for failure probability and the requirements for sustainable, resource-saving construction, which calls for completely new, much more holistic approaches to material development and structural design. The aim here is to build in a way that is both economical and climate-friendly without compromising structural safety, which is already a complex undertaking. However, the influence of the use of materials, architecture and construction technology on social aspects is often given much less consideration in the sustainability debate, even though enormous population growth and urbanisation processes are expected in the future, particularly in developing economic areas. This inevitably requires a stronger focus on the socio-economic aspects of construction, especially since, in contrast to many current metropolises, many conurbations in these regions will emerge in areas that are not yet densely populated. This provides freedom for innovative concepts that avoid the mistakes of the past and can consider all aspects of sustainability as largely equal. This freedom enables construction methods and urban concepts that use renewable, circular, local materials to create adaptable, accessible and liveable structures that are equitable, inclusive and fair for society. This position paper deals with the socio-economic footprint of materials and buildings. It was compiled by an interdisciplinary group of international experts and attempts to develop approaches for effective socio-economic life cycle analysis using similar concepts to those used in environmental life cycle analysis of products and buildings. In contrast to economic analyses or environmental life cycle assessments, which can work with reasonably available and clearly defined units to develop indicators, it is often impossible to determine units for socio-economic indicators, data is more difficult to obtain and there is a lack of benchmarks. During the discussions, a number of relevant parameters were developed, which can provide clearly quantifiable indicators for socio economic effects. These are related to largely available economic and employment data and consider the distribution of project contracts during implementation and the employment figures associated with project implementation. Particularly in the implementation of large-scale projects involving international investors and financial institutions, ‘(green) compliance value extractivism’ effects can occur, whereby partners from the donor countries are given preference over local project partners. This fraction of the loan flow directly abroad and can no longer serve the local economy to grow. This results in economic follow-up costs, even with lower project costs, which can promote social injustices. The higher the proportion of local companies and employees at engineering levels, the more fairly the construction project serves the local economy.
Schmidt et al. (Thu,) studied this question.