A structural performance-based environmental impact assessment framework for natural hazard loads

The decision-making process of planning a sustainable and resilient community may often encounter the availability of different building design alternatives that can make use of different structural solutions, which inevitably translate into different environmental impacts and structural performances to natural hazards. To reveal the trade-offs among different design alternatives and effectively support decision-making, the differences in environmental and structural performance must be simultaneously accounted so that the environmental benefits provided by an eco-friendlier alternative do not jeopardize resilience in the form of natural-hazard structural performance. The objective of this study is to take the first step in creating a multidisciplinary framework that combines PBD and LCA to enable the direct comparison of the structural performance-based environmental impacts of different building alternatives. Using a developed performance normalization index, the framework normalizes the structural performance of the building alternatives investigated to enable a direct quantitative comparison of their environmental impacts. The framework can help decision makers select the most suitable building alternative for balanced structural performance to natural hazard loads and environmental impacts. For demonstration purposes, the framework is applied to compare two seven-story building alternatives made from cross laminated timber and reinforced concrete materials in a tsunami-prone region. The results of the case study indicated that the normalized environmental impacts of the RC building were lower than the CLT building for most limit states considered, which may not have been evident without the proposed framework.

Automated summary

The decision-making process for planning a sustainable and resilient community must consider the trade-offs between environmental benefits and structural performance to natural hazards in different building design alternatives. A multidisciplinary framework combining Performance-Based Design and Life Cycle Assessment enables a direct comparison of the structural performance-based environmental impacts of different building materials, helping decision makers select the most suitable option considering both structural performance and environmental impacts.