Construction Project Level-based Environmental, Social, and Governance (C-ESG): A Review
Sungjin Kim, Soowon Chang
Abstract
Sustainable business has been shed light on as a new way of business success by emphasizing global and local responsibility of environment, community, society, and economy in the industry and company levels. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors of construction companies have often been evaluated by aggregating sustainability performance of their projects. However, the ESG is still underperforming in the project level. Therefore, the objective of this research is to propose the concept of the construction project level ESG (C-ESG) for facilitating sustainability practices in the construction industry. C-ESG intends to guide the valuation of non- financial performance in ESG and to achieve a higher level of sustainable development goals (SDG) for the construction project. A comprehensive literature review was conducted to consolidate evaluation metrics and key concepts in ESG, and adapt the ESG framework to the construction project context. In the project levels, three conceptual applications of the ESG framework can be considered: identifying priority public investment projects, supporting the bid/no-bid decisions, and monitoring and evaluating project progress. This research identified the needs and opportunities of C-ESG. In the future, further studies will be conducted to define key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics, and quantification methods in the three C-ESG types.