After finishing the course, the student is able to:
- Describe how societal developments (e.g. urbanization, migration, energy transition, etc.) and climate change influence the civil engineering infrastructure;
- Distinguish and describe the “instrumentation of sustainability and circularity”, i.e. the criteria, indicators, tools, models, methods, methodologies and frameworks by which sustainability and circularity are defined and measured;
- Evaluate the sustainability and circularity of real case studies involving civil engineering infrastructure;
- Formulate changes in the design or project that can increase its degree of sustainability and circularity while at the same time meeting other important constraints and requirements;
- Describe the main principles of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and distinguish among various multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods;
- Evaluate the trade-offs inherent to the concepts of sustainability and circularity by critically using MCDM methods;
- Communicate the assignments outputs in a clear, structured and convincingly way to a broad audience composed by experts and non-expert.
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This course addresses Sustainability and Circularity of civil infrastructure and built environment in a broad sense with attention for economic, environmental and social aspects. Sustainability is achieved when the whole society has the capacity and opportunity to maintain and improve its quality of life without degrading the quantity, quality and availability of economic, environmental and social capital.
With the increasing evidence of global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions and the reduced availability of natural resources, the pressure to create regenerative systems where waste, emission and energy leakage is minimized has become increasingly important. Circular economy is therefore an important element to move from a linear economy that traditionally follows the ‘take-make-dispose’ approach to the restorative or regenerative approach by design. It aims to gradually decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources to benefit economy, society and the environment. In this context, civil engineers need to be armed with skills than enable them to develop and apply ways, means, and methods to study and analyze the construction and management processes of civil engineering infrastructure towards improving their sustainability and circularity levels.
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