Sustainability Management Strategies and Impact in Developing Countries: Volume 26

Oversupplied emission basically will create a global economic downturn, which will lead to the implications for the climate action more broadly. Though the pandemic has test the resilience of carbon initiatives, there is urgency in identifying the carbon tax to strengthen as jurisdiction around the world ambitious in adopting and mitigating the targets as an introductory of the associated policy tools. Based on different situations and disciplines, the carbon tax model is simulated in different ways. The purpose of this study is to compare the available approaches that have been utilised by researchers and to determine the methods that suitable the most. The carbon tax and its influence on the construction sector are being benchmark and discussed as the whole of this document. A bibliometric approach is the method in this study in between the keyword of a carbon tax and the construction industry based on the data available in database of Scopus and Web of Science to foresee the interconnection between the knowledge of understanding and definition. The definition of carbon tax is the Pigovian tax that is designed to reduce the greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted with aim to act as a green tax and been paid by the industries that emitted GHGs as for the carbon emission reduction agenda. The implementation is parallel to the other government policies and in sync to the sustainable development goals.

This chapter reviews and compares Southeast Asia country practices on global, regional, and local practices for disaster risk assessment (DRA). DRA research and practices include and create a disaster risk management (DRM) solution. There are 11 countries in Southeast Asia, but only 10 countries are members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), except Timor-Leste. The key objective of ASEAN’s formation is cooperation in economic growth, social, regional peace and cultural development, disaster management cooperation, and humanitarian assistance at the regional level. The DRM system practiced in ASEAN member countries is discussed in this chapter. Furthermore, the system and findings of DRAs are also addressed. Globally, two DRA structures are discussed and compared, namely Index of Risk Management (INFORM) and World Risk Index (WRI). In addition, regional vulnerability assessment guidelines for regional and national levels are discussed. However, several selected studies and practices such as the Indonesian Risk Index (InaRISK) are being discussed at the local level. Overall, there is space for improvement of coordination in terms of data and technology sharing for DRM, especially for assessment. The finding of this review highlighted the complexity of DRA at the global and regional levels and encouraging community DRA among the ASEAN members.

The Greenery system on buildings is an interesting approach to address the urban, and environmental issues yet provide economic and social benefits. The educational campus in Higher Learning Institution (HLI) has been regarded as a small city that can implement the greenery system area. Green roofs have rapidly become a key in sustainable building development and design features for urban cities and have started being applied in a campus building. However, the built environment in the campus is mostly covered with the existing buildings. Several studies also conducted green roof aspects but with a vast focus on the new building design. Thus, there is an urgent need to identify retrofitting criteria on green roof implementation for existing buildings to achieve optimal solutions. This chapter aims to identify the influential criteria for implementing green roof initiatives in the educational building of HLI. A list of 12 green roof criteria has been identified based on design and economics. A questionnaire has been designed and distributed to architects as important stakeholders in green roof development. The results obtained were analysed with factor analysis based on principal component analysis with Varimax Rotation and Factor Score to categorise and rank according to the importance of criteria. The outcomes of this study showed that design criteria should concern waterproofing, drainage, and access; economic criteria are construction costs, return on investment, and maintenance cost. This study enables decision-makers to consider the criteria established during the decision of retrofitting an existing building with a green roof.

Green building is an outcome of a design that focuses on increasing the efficiency of resources use energy and national environment. A variety of assessment programmes were developed, such as green building incentive (GBI) had been implemented in Malaysia as a strong indication for the key player in the construction industry to use the opportunity for their companies by embracing the idea of green building focussing on renewable energies, energy conservation, green building, waste management, and support service. However, the current situation reveals that the incentives were not effective enough to encourage the key players to apply the green building concept in their development. The purpose of this research is to produce a new parameter of GBIs for construction key players in Malaysia. The participants of this research were among the implementer and policy maker in helping to produce new parameter on green building incentives in Malaysia. The significant of this new parameter is to provide some guidance to the government in improving and strengthen the prior incentive, hence increase the participation of key building players in green building development in Malaysia. Apart from that, the green incentives are considered to be valuable tools in generating interest, in creating a motive for the adoption of green building practices over conventional practices and in eliminating knowledge gaps.

Claims and disputes are often unavoidable in the construction industry due to its unique and complex characteristics involving the massive investment of capital, lengthy project duration, and multiple project stakeholders. This chapter intends to identify the critical construction claims attributes, compare the perceptions of major stakeholders on different claim attributes, and investigate the contrast of the top five claim attributes between this study and previous ones. The literature review resulted in 48 claim attributes responsible for the construction project schedule delays. These attributes were then presented to Vietnam construction industry (VCI) practitioners in the form of a questionnaire survey. Data analysis was done based on the collected 113 qualified samples. Relative importance index (RII) was applied to determine the ranking of claim attributes. The results were that the top five causes of claims, that is, payment delays, mistakes by contractor during construction stage, delays in work progress by the contractor, financial failure of the contractor, and frequently changing requirements by the owner, lead to the schedule delays in VCI. These findings can assist the local industry practitioners and foreign companies seeking a share in the VCI market in understanding the causes of construction claims comprehensively and formulating the countermeasures to minimise their impacts and hence reduce the unnecessary losses and raise the likelihood of success as well as maintain sustainable relationships among stakeholders.

A crucial aspect of supply chain management (SCM) is the formulation of lean supply chain management (LSCM). In this sense, the key practices are extended towards the LSCM settings as alternative strategies and several frameworks were developed to help companies to make choices based on production disruption. Studies in this field have focussed mainly on SCM. Although manufacturing businesses recognise the necessity of effective SCM, but little study has been done on manufacturing LSCM. The behaviour and the potential for significant impacts on sustainable performance (SP) in manufacturing companies can vary with time and variations for approaches of the LSCM key practices. This chapter, therefore, focusses on main practices for LSCM on the basis of evaluations of experts in the Malaysian manufacturing sector in order to achieve SP in manufacturing companies. The aim of this chapter is to identify the key practices in LSCM on SP. Hence, this chapter reviewed 172 articles published from 2015 to 2019, used the methodology for SLR with three main steps: literature review planning, reviewing, and reporting. As a result, there are evidence that the key practices for LSCM used in previous studies are (1) customer relationship management, (2) supplier relationship management, (3) just in time manufacturing, (4) waste reduction, (5) cost reduction, and (6) minimise inventory level. In manufacturing industries, LSCM is more complex. Insights on the causing issues and SP are provided. Finally, this chapter contributes to SCM and literature on sustainability and has managerial implications for companies to improve SP more effectively.

The concept of sustainability is about the relationships among people, the planet, and profit. Nowadays, it has been spread to many areas, including construction projects. Sustainability in construction projects has been so important in the present time. It is commonly pointed to the environment and construction materials. Nevertheless, it is also important in construction management which addresses sustainable project scheduling. Sustainable project scheduling will help to deliver the project under the deadlines, within the available budget, and also ensuring about the quality of the works. This study presents the trade-off among time, cost, and quality in the construction project to provide the decision-maker some alternative solutions in the planning phase to conduct a sustainable construction project. Multi-objective optimisation using Symbiotic Organism Search (SOS) algorithm is done to find the best solutions to the problem under investigation. Then, fuzzy logic approach is utilised to model the diverse environment and uncertainty in the construction project. A case study in repetitive construction project is analysed to see the capability of the model to work in time cost quality trade-off to reach into a sustainable construction project.

Sustainable recycling activities in higher education institutions (HEIs) are crucial as it serves as a common benchmark to a community that is socially and environmentally responsible. This chapter presents a suitable case study of HEIs in Malaysia reporting on recycling rate, monitoring the recycling patterns, and matching the significant recycling policy in the HEIs. Therefore, four HEIs including Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Universiti Malaya (UM), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) were selected as the suitable case studies to examine the practices of recycling activities. These four HEIs are Malaysian research universities that are ranked in the top 300 in the UI Green Metric World University Rankings. Several findings and previous works were reviewed; further steps to set a recycling target were identified and served as a guidance of the standard recycling rate. Results showed the selected HEIs reflected the low percentage of recycling rate in the range of 0.03–29.26%, depending on its practices and policy. Three phases of planning have been structured to target the recycling rate at HEIs in Malaysia with the First Plan (2025), Second Plan (2035) and Third Plan (2040) towards the recycling rates of 20%, 30% and 40%, respectively. The recommendations for the HEIs formulate recycling policies and recycling rates, and for waste management, academia and research centres to play a more active role in increasing the efficiency of recycling activities for a positive impact on the recycling rate in HEIs.

Industries’ projects are associated with large amounts of data throughout the project lifecycle. As the size of the projects grows, so does the data associate with the projects. To generate useful information from Big Data, appropriate predictive analysis and data visualisation tools are required. Therefore, the use of visualisation techniques will target this expected evolution of big data. Thus, this study aims to give an overview of the migrations of an existing computer-based application, used to analyse multidata sources of enterprises, to a web-based application. Essential development aspects were concerned with the process of application development, platform development, software utilisation, and efficient display interface according to the enterprise’s requirement. Two solutions such as Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI) and the Dynamic Web System have been presented that proven to be widespread because these solutions have met the enterprises’ requirements in terms of expenses, policy, security, maintenance, and interactive interface. Also, an assessment of these solutions and challenges to adopting has been presented. Eventually, the system developed on the web overcomes computer-based systems in solving their problems such as deploying and maintaining applications and providing efficient and richer user interfaces for users. The web-based visualisation application has wide beneficial features; it provides high-performance real-time data analysis, data multimodal visualisation, and friendly to use. Web-based applications will increase confidence in decision-making based on data visualisation, which will positively reflect on comprehensive data analysis processes for project success.

Almost every year the nation was shocked by the fire incident at school and hostel. The Fire and Rescue Department of Malaysia (2020) recorded 216 fires that have occurred at the private Islamic religious schools from 2015 until 2019, where several fires have killed many students, such as accidents in 1985, 1998, 2013, 2014 and 2017. As a result, the public began questioning the level of awareness among the school administrators. Addressing these issues, a survey has been conducted on the private Islamic religious schools that had experienced fire incidents in order to identify the awareness level among the administrators and students and to investigate whether aspects of compliance with fire safety procedures are enhanced. Four groups of respondents were selected, in which the Department of Fire and Rescue acts as a focus group. The other three groups are the victims who have faced the fire itself in their respective schools. The findings highlighted that the awareness level among victims towards the fire prevention practices is very low. Evidence has revealed there is no periodic supervision towards fire safety equipment, and only 35% comply with the standard procedure. Experts suggest sustainable school building should introduce to meet the criteria in performance-based fire management solutions. This reflects the fact that building continuity and fire safety can be complementary, not contradictory, if the two disciplines engage in meaningful dialogue at the beginning of the design process.

The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) proposed the development of eco-industrial parks (EIP) related to the 9th, 12th, and 13th of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for ensuring green industrial practice to deal with climate change. The first approach to EIP is choosing a suitable site, however, it is not a simple task, because it involves spatial factors and is always impaired by uncertainties that require more than one decision module. There is a fewer study in objectively assessing the criteria for the selection of suitable sites for EIP development to contribute to the SDG initiative. This study provides an integrated process for assessing a consistent weight of criteria for EIP site selection. Nine steps were used in the fuzzy-analytical hierarchy process namely criterion identification, hierarchical structure construction, triangular fuzzy number matrix, geometric ratio, fuzzy relative weight, defuzzification, normalisation, sensitivity analysis (SA) and weight ranking. When tested using spatial and non-spatial criteria for EIP site selection, results show transportation infrastructure (13%), raw materials (12%), water bodies (12%), climate (10%), labour (9%), land use (9%), markets (9%), governmental policies (8%), existing industries (7%), urban settlement (6%), and restricted areas (5%). The SA verified that any evaluation error of 2% or 5% on the criteria weight is insignificant, but for 10% error, results can be distorted. The study has developed a consistent, simple approach integrating hierarchical and uncertainty modules for choosing EIP locations, and it is proposed as a guide for selecting suitable greenfield or brownfield EIP sites for sustainable industrial practices.

The equability of environment, social and economic elements becomes a major issue to be achieved as to attain sustainability in the development of a construction project. As to cater to social sustainability, the Guidelines on Occupational Safety and Health in Construction Industry (Management) also known as OSHCIM has been introduced by the government to improve safety practices amongst Malaysia’s construction practitioners. The basic principle adopted in OSHCIM is Prevention through Design (PtD), which enhances the elimination of hazards during project design stages. This concept is inspired from the implementation of Construction (Design and Management) (CDM) Regulations in the United Kingdom. The concept has also been adopted and practised in many developed countries including Australia and Singapore. The aim of this study is to identify the dominant accident causes in Malaysian construction industry. In this study, the secondary data were gathered from the Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) accident statistics. A content analysis and frequency distribution analysis were adopted to determine causal factors that contribute to the fatality. The findings show the existence of design-related causal factors, which is also incorporated with other causes of accidents. This is true as every accident occurs due to more than one factor. Thus, these inputs will recommend further exploration to determine the design-related causal factors. This may help the industrial players, including stakeholders, practitioners and researchers, to have more focussed efforts and resources in ensuring the success of OSHCIM’s implementation to reduce the accident statistics in Malaysia.

A comprehensive understanding of the pandemic impact on daily behavioural patterns of travellers’ movement is crucial in creating safe and comfortable living environments. Since the Covid-19 pandemic has affected many countries in world, many countries have taken unusual steps of partial or full lockdowns. People’s normal routine has been disrupted, which has made the transport system indirectly coming to a halt worldwide. Online options have been introduced to maintain the operations for offices, private and government agencies and universities and e-commerce businesses become a spotlight. The study is designed as an effort to understand the travel behaviour of Malaysian women affected by Covid-19 pandemic. An online survey to determine the travel behaviour impact was used as a data collection strategy. Analysis of the collected data reveals significant changes in various aspects of women’s travel behaviour. The result will help to enable the policymaker in strategising the best solutions of travel options, which will also improve the women’s traveller safety for better and equitable transportation.

In Malaysia, there seems to be no mutual and general agreement among construction industry players and researchers on what the critical success factors (CSFs) of construction projects are since characteristics of construction projects vary across various projects complexity. This chapter thus examines the CSFs for affordable high-rise public housing projects in Malaysia through a thorough review of the literature on the CSFs, which were then contextually customised via a pilot study and presented in the form of Relative Importance Index (RII). Primary data were collected via administration of questionnaire surveys to 170 construction stakeholders of affordable high-rise public housing projects in Malaysia. The findings of this study revealed that the top 10 ranks are good management and supervision at site, good personal behaviour by all participants, good implementation in safety management and practice, high commitment in quality control by management, competent manager/supervisor, good communication and coordination, good and enough material and equipment, experience worker, clear objective and goals and good support by senior employee/management, whereby it is crucial in ensuring the project success of affordable high-rise public housing projects in Malaysia. This chapter provides clear guidelines for the contractors of affordable high-rise public housing projects to be more competitive in the construction industry by illustrating the important factors to be considered while delivering the projects to their respective clients.

Sustainability issues have become crucial to mitigate urban heat islands (UHIs) and reduce the global warming effect. The climate change news is frequently heard lately due to the extreme weather to the extent that the increasing earth’s temperature often causes disaster and loss of property and life. New adaptation needs to new climate context and limits the on-going effects. One of the ways is adopting green roofs on buildings. Implementing sustainable practices such as green roofs will help mitigate this adverse effect in urban areas. Green roofs provide many benefits such as enhancing the aesthetical quality of the built environment, reduce UHIs, reduce energy consumption, improve storm-water attenuation, roof longevity, and reduce noise pollution. However, only a few buildings in Malaysia have considering green roofs as a main green feature element. There is barely number of buildings that have green roof design even though it offers benefits to the community and environment. This chapter has emphasised the types of green roof systems that are potentially suitable in Malaysia climate and obstacles associated with the green roof system. The study found the barriers to implementing green roofs in Malaysia, especially during the stage of building operation in maintaining the green roof system. The survey has been done, which revealed nine factors that hinder the green roof application. This study also highlights the challenges to overcome the barriers of implementing green roofs in Malaysia.

Malaysia is still very much lacking behind in green building developments as compared to other countries such as Australia, Japan, and Singapore. Nevertheless, in order to strengthen the development of green building in Malaysia, government has provided and offers several initiatives to the construction key players in implementing green building such as investment tax allowance for the purchase of green technology equipment and income tax exemption on the use of green technology services and system, etc. Despite of all the incentives introduce, the implementation of green building construction still does not boast as expected and still relatively low. Therefore, this study will identify barriers, issues, and challenges faced by construction key players in implementing green building concepts especially related to green building incentives in their project. The opinions and views of related parties in building industry were obtained from structured interviews and questionnaires to key personnel in construction industry to give a clearer picture of the current situation. This study is succeeded in identifying the barriers and challenges, which mainly categorised into financial incentives, fiscal incentives, and structural incentives. The main issues identified are excessive cost of construction, tax exemption is limited and only for qualified person and legislative challenges. Nonetheless, this study also suggests various ways to overcome the barriers in promoting green building concept in Malaysia towards greener environment.

Fluorocarbon (FC) gas, which contributes to the ozone depletion and global warming, is commonly used especially in the refrigeration and air conditioning (RAC) equipment. In Malaysia, lifecycle management of FC gas is still lacking at all stages, especially at the downstream level (maintenance, service, recycle, recovery, and destruction). Thus, the aim of this study is to assess the level of awareness of local stakeholders and consumers regarding FC gas management. Furthermore, the level of awareness among the consumers has been identified based on their educational background. Two sets of questionnaires were developed based on the dichotomous question types (yes/no) and were distributed to local stakeholders and consumers by using convenience sampling in two different programmes. The data were statistically analysed using IBM SPSS software. Findings demonstrate that, in contrast to consumers, local stakeholders have high level of awareness in every section. Remarkably, all non-engineering respondents have a low level of awareness about FC gas management. As a result, capacity building for consumers and service maintenance personnel who are heavily involved in middle steam and downstream lifecycle FC gas management is needed.

Adequate, reliable, and efficient urban infrastructure systems (UIS) are fundamental to sustainable development, social mobility, and economic vitality. As communities continuously rely on basic infrastructure services to support their daily communal functions, major components of UIS are subject to heavy use, and thus rapidly deteriorate over time; hence, it is critical that efficient infrastructure management strategies practices are in place. As current strategies remain confronted with various limitations including adaptability to changing conditions, lack of public engagement, and cost-effectiveness, this study explores social media data mining as an approach to revitalise and support current urban infrastructure monitoring strategies by extracting valuable insights from public opinion. Twitter messages or ‘Tweets’ pertaining to public infrastructure in The Philippines were collected and analysed to identify recurring issues in public infrastructure, emerging topics in public discussions, and the overall perception of the public on infrastructure services. This study presents a topic model that extracts dominant topics from aggregated social media data and a sentiment analysis model that determines public opinion sentiment in relation to different urban infrastructure components. The findings of this study highlight the potential of social media data mining to surpass the limits of conventional data collection techniques and the importance of public opinion as a key driver for a more user-involved decision-making in infrastructure management and as an important social aspect that can be utilised to support planning and response strategies in routine maintenance, preservation, and improvement of UIS.

Malaysia is one of the developing countries which is progressing in terms of infrastructural facilities, but the country is facing a problem of having very low growth in population and this led to the frequent migration of workers with language proficiency to come to the country as foreign workers, language proficiency implications among which is causing injury to workers in the construction especially foreigners as they are getting it difficult to understand instruction during operations, safety guides and interpreting safety warning signs due to their low language proficiency. Because of this, the research aimed to reduce the rate of accident happening among the foreign workers and, therefore, the research sets three objectives: the research identified the common types of accidents faced by foreign workers due to language proficiency in construction sites, the research also investigated the extent to which language proficiency is affecting foreign workers and lastly provides an effective communication method that will help to minimise the rate of these types of accidents. The research found that language proficiency is causing several types of accidents that comes with different injury cases ranging from non-severe, severe and fatal once of about 44% of the total accident cases happening in the Malaysian construction industries.

Under-reporting of an occupational accident is commonly found at both organisational and individual levels. It interferes with the reality of health and safety in organisations and countries. It also hinders the ability to identify trends, recognise priorities, improve strategies, and allocation of resources for accident prevention. This study examined the reasons for the under-reporting of occupational accidents at the organisation level in the Nigerian construction industry. A review of the literature was conducted on the under-reporting of occupational accidents. Thereafter, a field survey with questionnaires was distributed to solicit information from the Nigerian construction professionals in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Nigeria. 300 questionnaires were distributed, and 235 responses were received and analysed with Microsoft Excel and SPSS software by applied relative importance index and ranked. The study found that among the top-ranked reasons for under-reporting of occupational accidents by the organisation is to maintain a reputation. It is therefore important to increase awareness on the reporting of occupational accidents and its importance in accident prevention programmes by the regulatory bodies. Also, more collaborative efforts, standards, and policies should be put in place by the governments for ensuring reporting and record-keeping of accidents in the Nigerian construction industry. Records of dangerous incidents are the key indicator for the organisation for the improvement in the prevention of hazards. The study, therefore, concludes that there should be proper recording and surveillance of occupational accidents, hazards, and their related background causes in reaction to quick and complex variations in work-life.

Cleats are considered one of the significant permeability-related parameters in coalbed methane (CBM) growth. As critical parameters for CBM extraction, a complete characterisation of cleat distributions and orientation can provide a better tool to indirectly estimate porosity and permeability in coal reservoirs. This chapter presents the outcomes of the production of comprehensive research cleats within Miocene coal seams as part of CBM exploration and development. The majority of data (cross-section view measurement) were collected on mine’s walls. Cleat data were gathered from 16 windows measurement locations with hundreds of cleats were measured from outcrops for several coal seams. Two primary cleat orientations; for face cleats, NNE-SSW and for butt cleats, ESE-WNW. The ratio of low permeability coals appears to have a smaller cleat aperture than high permeability coals. As critical parameters for CBM extraction, a complete characterisation of cleat distributions and orientation can provide a better tool to indirectly estimate porosity and permeability in coal reservoirs.

The correlations between mechanical behaviour, tensile strength, and rock parameters of metasedimentary rock samples in Karak, Pahang’s New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) were statistically evaluated from the rock mechanic laboratory works at the selected sections around 2,000 m of the tunnel (named as NATM-1). According to a statistical analysis, lithotypes, geological structures, and region geology have a significant impact on the mechanical behaviour of the metasedimentary rock. In the Brazilian test, the fracture behaviour of the disc specimens was highly related to the reliability and precision of the experimental data by validations of methods. In this work, the impact of different loading methods and rock lithotypes on the failure mechanism of Brazilian discs was examined utilising five different metasedimentary rock types and three different loading methods. During the loading operation, the strain and displacement fields of the specimens were recorded and evaluated using a computerised strain gauge system. The rock types, according to experimental data, have a significant impact on the peak load and deformation properties of Brazilian discs. With the method below, tensile strength point of a disc specimen is clearly regulated by the material stiffness and tensile–compression ratio. Seismic occurrences have had a substantial impact on changing the rock and exerting forces that may affect its mechanical characteristics as well as its vulnerability to weathering effects or discontinuities. As a result, the goal of this study is to look into the connection between rock mechanics and metasedimentary rock stress analysis in NATM-1, Karak, Pahang.