Sustainable Cities and Society

Volume 87, December 2022, 104238

A building sustainability assessment system (BSAS)

for least developed countries: A case of Ethiopia
Sintayehu Assefa a, Hsin-Yun Lee b , Fang-Jye Shiue c

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Abstract

The principle of sustainability or meeting the needs of the current generation without imperiling the needs
of the next generation become a major concern in modern infrastructure development. Economically least
developed countries (LDCs) are struggling to meet the demand of current generation through large amount
of infrastructure development. Ethiopia, one of the LDCs, provides a good example of sustainable energy
development. However, the country has no local building sustainability assessment system and studies
confirmed that internationally available systems are not suitable for LDCs like Ethiopia. This new building
sustainability assessment system (BSAS) is developed after identifying non-sustainable practices, and
challenges of building construction industry in the study area. Because of the principle is new for most of
experts in the country, a combination of subjective expert evaluation and judgmental scale was applied to
assign weightings using the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method. Two new buildings in the
study area were evaluated to demonstrate the new system. Finally, the assessment system is compared with
well-known existing systems around the world and in the continent. This work helps to promote
sustainable building construction practices in Ethiopia and other economically LDCs by serving as reference
and benchmark.

Introduction

Studies and reports show that the 50 years of investment in infrastructure development in Africa has failed
to bring economic growth, instead it is criticized of creating more environmental and social problems
(du Plessis, 2005). According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (2021),
about 50% of the African countries, including Ethiopia are categorized as economically least developed. The
lower quantity, quality and accessibility of infrastructure (Gurara et al., 2018) in addition to the global
climate rise (Greene & Jacobs, 2021) makes the continent problem more challenging. Therefore, the
countries in the continent are facing two parallel challenges: fulfilling the infrastructure problem, and
aligning their development with sustainability (Aste et al., 2020). Though the challenge of sustainable
development, which “aims to meet the demand of present without compromising the future generation”
(WCED, 1987) is global issue, yet the strategies and weight distribution (Zarghami et al., 2019) for building
construction needs local action and differ from region to region (ISO, 2011). Out of 54 internationally
recognized countries in Africa, only 9 countries have official green building council (WGBC, 2021). In
addition, the African countries has also limitations of research in building sustainability assessment systems
(BSAS) (Lazar & Chithra, 2020). The situation makes the implementation of sustainable construction
principle less effective globally.

Economically least developed countries have contributed less to global climate change (Tollefson, 2019).
However, they are victims of the impact (O'Keeffe, 2016) and have the least ability to adapt to the challenges
(Huq et al., 2004). The climate change impact on agriculture causes the rural people move in to urban area,
leading to the rapid increase of urbanization (e.g., Ethiopia) (Aste et al., 2020; O'Keeffe, 2016). To minimize
the infrastructure problem in the country, the Ethiopian government is allocating about 58%-60% of the
annual budget on construction industry (Belay et al., 2021). Due to poor project management (Gadisa &
Zhou, 2021), poor urban planning (Belay et al., 2021), weak implementation of regulation/policy (Mengistu &
Mahesh, 2020a), use of substandard materials (Achamyeleh & Şahin, 2019), and less adoptability for new
technology (MoST, 2017), the projects are not sustainable.

Most of the existing sustainable building (green building) evaluation systems are developed in economically
developed countries and are influenced by local situations in their country of origin (Amasuomo et al., 2017).
Previous studies confirmed that, the international standards available to evaluate sustainable construction
are not suitable for least developed countries like Ethiopia (Taffese & Abegaz, 2019). For example, most of
the widely adopted green building rating systems (GBRSs) did not include fire safety. The structural safety,
compatibility with local culture and history are neglected (Ascione et al., 2022), the economic pillar and
construction management performance (Hwang et al., 2015; Liang et al., 2021) get less consideration in most
of the existing systems. The rating system to be implemented in economically least developed nations like
Ethiopia shall consider challenges and priority areas in those countries. This challenge includes but is not
limited to existing policy/regulation implementation capability, the initial investment cost/affordability
(Aste et al., 2020), mechanism to improve community life, existing best practices of traditional buildings
(Nematchoua & Reiter, 2021), technological advancement of the countries (MoST, 2017), and construction
management challenges that affects the sustainability of building.

This research team first identified areas of sustainability for Ethiopian building construction and then
compared the challenges with popular existing rating systems. The researchers found that, it is difficult to
achieve sustainability using existing systems because of special situations in the study area. Therefore, new
building sustainability assessment system (BSAS) that consider current economic and technological
advancement of the country is developed in this study.

The weighting assignment in this study follows combination of approach to the gap of balancing weight
among three main pillars (environmental, social and economic) (Shi et al., 2016). Therefore, in addition to
expert evaluation, the direct and indirect contribution of identified attributes were converted in to
quantitative scale based on the principle of “three main pillars are equally important” (Duić et al., 2015;
Purvis et al., 2019). To overcome the limitation of most of existing systems in linking the relationship
between indicators and UN SDG 2030 (Alawneh et al., 2019), the identified indicators’ contribution to the
goal is analyzed and described in Appendix C. Finally, case study buildings were used for validation and the
developed system is compared with popular existing systems.
This study is the first study conducted in LDCs sustainable building construction assessment system. It is
also the first work to integrate building construction management challenges in to BSAS. It promotes and
motivate practitioners in the industry to consider wider perspective of sustainability challenges and used as
benchmark for implementation of sustainable construction principles in Ethiopia and other LDCs.

The next part of the paper is organized in to four sections. The literature review part focuses on the
situation and challenges of building construction in Ethiopia and sustainable building indicators based on
the ISO sustainable building standard. In the research method section, the approach used to identify
attributes and weighting system is clarified. The result and discussion part covered the new BSAS evaluation
approach, main attributes and their weight distribution, case study building assessment result, and
comparison of the new system with existing systems. Finally, we draw conclusions of the study output in
final section.

Section snippets

The situation of building construction industry in Ethiopia

Desk study conducted by this research team revealed that, the sustainable building construction challenges
in Ethiopia is different from the developed and most of the developing nations in many aspects. The main
challenges that lead to wastage of resource (Hoornweg et al., 2014), time (Cheng & Darsa, 2021; Godfrey et al.,
2019; Sinesilassie et al., 2017) and money (Ferede et al., 2020; Sinesilassie et al., 2019) in addition to affecting
the environment are: weak implementation of…

Research method

The new assessment system categories, criteria and requirements were identified from existing GBRSs,
previous studies on BSAS, webpages, and sustainability reports regarding least developed nations. After
finishing desk review, experts were consulted to add, remove or modify the identified attributes. The
indicators under “mandatory” and “prerequisite” have no credit, so no weight is assigned. For criteria with
weight, the analysis of relative importance from ISO-CAP (international…

Working mechanism of new BSAS

Most of the existing GBRSs had separate versions for new buildings and existing buildings. Moreover, the
new construction versions may have their own unique indicators based on the building type, such as
residential, office, industrial, and commercial, among others. This BSAS is developed to evaluate all types of
new building designs and construction while some of the criteria are applicable for specific type of building
as shown in Appendix C.

The new BSAS is developed to evaluate the whole…

Conclusion

Almost all of standards used in construction industry of LDCs are originated in economically developed
nations. In practice, they consider the situation of the country of origin. Previous researchers emphasized
the problem of directly adopting standards and also limitations of existing systems in considering
developing countries situation. The new BSAS is developed after identifying the limitations of existing
systems and the sustainability challenges in LDCs mainly in Ethiopian building…
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that
could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.…

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