Editorial

Citation

Yang, J. (2016), "Editorial", Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, Vol. 5 No. 4, pp. 306-306. https://doi.org/10.1108/SASBE-10-2016-0029

The five papers in this issue cover the aspects of people capability, policy setting and technology innovation. The first two papers look at how project management professionals and students, our future professionals, may develop their sustainability outlooks and capabilities through education and practice. Lau et al. examined the environmental worldviews of Malaysian project managers. They found compatibility of resolve between protecting the environment and exploiting natural resources for development. Through a case in an Australia university, Xia et al. studied the necessity and protocols of embedding sustainability agenda in quantity surveying courses. They believe incorporating sustainability themes into existing relevant subjects can be an effective way to equip students with the right knowledge quickly.

University campuses are a unique place to showcase research and development and influence sustainability adoption. In spite of the advantage, Hopkins found there are barriers for universities in the USA to develop policies towards green building implementation. She went on to identify some of these barriers and suggested a collaborative approach by stakeholders based on making policies with clear incentives and benefits.

Also within the setting of university campuses, authors of the next two papers utilised opportunities provided by the unique campus space to develop, test and endorse new techniques that will make the built environment smart and sustainable. Shooshtarian and Ridley investigated the validity of indirect measures of acceptable thermal range in the outdoor space of an Australian university campus, and explored the extent to which such indirect measures are considered as a reliable source of information compared to the direct measure. Drones, or more scientifically unmanned aerial vehicles, are increasingly used to assist human activities. Ghosh et al. used an instrument-fitted drone to fly over campus buildings in an Indian university. They combined measurements taken by the drone with computational fluid dynamical analysis to gain insights into the ventilation patterns around an assortment of building forms.

Five years have passed since the inauguration of the SASBE journal. We have made some great achievements but also face new challenges. SASBE receives an increasing number of recognitions from regional research authorities such as those in Norway, Brazil and Australia, and from world listing and ranking bodies such as Scopus. Download of our journal has exceeded 7,000 per volume by readers from a wide range of countries such as China, UK, USA, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and more. We produced a number of special issues to promote regional development and topics of emerging interests.

Despite the expansion of our reviewer base, the editorial team often faces difficulties in securing timely feedback from reviewers. There is now a changing timeframe and process of applying for Thomson Reuters’ impact factor. We have to wait patiently to qualify for the assessment. SASBE’s recent inclusion in the newly launched Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) by Thomson Reuters, a prerequisite of being considered for impact factor, sheds light on the journal’s promising future. While we remain very optimistic about the next five years, we need support from the whole community to contribute papers, use our published research and nurture SASBE, the only journal that focusses on integrated solutions to the development of smart and sustainable built environment.