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Sustainable construction is an emerging field of science that aims at incorporating the general sustainable development concepts into conventional construction practices. While the foundation of knowledge in this field is continuously expanding, sustainable construction is not yet standard industry practice. One major technical barrier that hinders enacting sustainable construction is the absence of an application framework that integrates both sustainability and construction practices at an operational level. This shortcoming is being addressed through a three-dimensional operational context space (OCS) that achieves the sought integration aspect. The three dimensions of OCS are: (1) project life cycle phases; (2) project executing entities; and (3) sustainability performance parameters. Such OCS facilitates the association of responsibility, by assigning each sustainability requirement to a specific project entity (or entities) during specific project phase(s), and further provides a numerical assessment for construction projects using sustainability as a criterion. Steps of constructing the OCS and how it could be employed in the evaluation and benchmarking of a project's environmental performance are examined, along with sample illustrations in the area of construction waste management.Sustainability, sustainable construction, environmental impact, integration, benchmarking,

Project risk analysis must be implemented using a systematic approach where project size, data availability and project team requirements are promptly taken into account. However, complex projects are marred with numerous interconnected causes and effects, which make project dynamics rather difficult to understand and control. One approach to overcome this hardship and provide a facility to understand and visualize such dependencies is risk mapping. With emphasis on the pipeline construction sector in the Middle East, the research at hand aims first to identify the most critical risk factors in the denoted sector and then to develop a dynamic risk map (DRM) for it. N2 Diagrams were employed to construct the interdependency relationships of the DRM. The DRM can be utilized in calculating the significance of project risks via posterior probabilities. In this context, the cross impact analysis (CIA) method is proposed as an appropriate computational and reasoning tool. The CIA method is simply a technique designed to predict chances of future events by capturing the interactions among a set of variables. From the DRM it is possible to envisage not only the ultimate effect of a risk on the project but also the incremental steps leading to it. This makes it possible to evaluate the effect of potential risk factors for unlimited project scenarios.