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Open research questions in Sustainable Building Design and Assessment

405 gap statements mined from Sustainable Building Design and Assessment papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 1,638 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.

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What the literature leaves open

  • The paper notes the need to denoise weak trade-offs and enhance sparsity in the trade-off matrices. The paper identifies the challenge of preventing division-by-zero errors and ensuring smooth scaling across firms.

    Environmental and financial performance in the S&P 500: a novel mcdm approach · 2026 · DOI

  • Sector-specific models could be developed to explore finer-grained trade-offs within industries, such as between transition capital expenditures and profitability in Utilities or between R&D and emissions in Technology. Cross-market comparisons between the S&P 500, EU-listed firms, and major emerging market indices would shed light on how institutional environments shape the ESG-financial nexus.

    Environmental and financial performance in the S&P 500: a novel mcdm approach · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research should examine how sustainable practices vary across countries and identify the most effective strategies for contractors to implement locally to improve the uptake of sustainability in building construction.

    Sustainable Practices for Building Construction in New Zealand · 2026 · DOI

  • Limited adoption of circular economy practices in social housing construction projects. Lack of understanding of barriers, strategies, and motivations influencing CE implementation. Need for stakeholder-oriented recommendations to support project management and reuse of demolition waste resources.

    Implementing circular economy in housing redevelopment project: a case study in Australia · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research should focus on optimising LEED evaluation criteria by addressing the application of insulation suited to distinct climate conditions.

    LEED Certification in Building Energy Efficiency: A Review of Its Performance Efficacy and Global Applicability · 2025 · DOI

  • Future research should focus on enhancing material performance through nanotechnology, developing interpretable AI models for building optimization, harmonizing international certification systems, and promoting inclusive stakeholder engagement.

    A Literature Review of Sustainable Building Research: Bibliometric Analysis from 2015–2025 · 2025 · DOI

  • The author focused on two fundamentally different small groups, in which the variables are only two key LEED indicators, in order to use simple significance tests to draw statistical inferences; consequently, a limitation of this study design is that only two small groups were compared (n1 = 13, n2 = 13).

    Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for LEED Version 4 (LEED-EB v4) Gold Certification Strategies for Existing Buildings in the United States: A Case Study · 2025 · DOI

  • While previous research has focused on the social, environmental, and economic components of SCMs, this study is the first to incorporate technological factors, an innovative inclusion that has not been thoroughly examined in the New Zealand context. This study contributes significantly to the body of knowledge on sustainable construction materials by filling critical gaps in the literature.

    Factors Affecting the Selection of Sustainable Construction Materials: A Study in New Zealand · 2025 · DOI

  • The construction industry lacks skilled labor, established concepts, market conditions, and appropriate regulations or policies to support CE adoption. The industry faces challenges in design flexibility and quality control in prefabrication and offsite construction. The construction stage has limited influence on CE implementation compared to earlier stages.

    Exploring Circular Economy Strategies in Buildings: Evaluating Feasibility, Stakeholders Influence, and the Role of the Building Lifecycle in Effective Adoption · 2025 · DOI

  • Future research should explore integrating digital intelligence, such as BIM modeling, to better align energy consumption indicators with project documents and tailor strategies to regional climates and energy baselines.

    Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: An Index System for Building Energy Retrofit Projects · 2024 · DOI

  • Future research could explore strategies to amplify these benefits, encouraging the widespread adoption of energy-efficient retrofitting practices across Europe and beyond. However, the long-term effects of retrofitting on property value and energy performance remain unexplored.

    Increasing the Market Value of Buildings Through Energy Retrofitting: A Comparison of Actual Retrofit Costs and Perceived Values · 2025 · DOI

  • Future research may consider expanding the keyword scope or incorporating multi-level search strategies to include a wider range of carbon reduction studies while maintaining methodological focus.

    Exploring Carbon Emissions in the Construction Industry: A Review of Accounting Scales, Boundaries, Trends, and Gaps · 2025 · DOI

  • These limitations are also mirrored in digital tools and modeling, as both Moroni’s and Batty’s critiques underline that single, all-encompassing digital twins are insufficient for comprehensively capturing urban complexity.

    Beyond Sustainability: Paradigms for Complexity and Resilience in the Built Environment · 2025 · DOI

  • Existing studies have yielded conflicting results, indicating the need for a more comprehensive understanding of the sentiment surrounding these terms in diverse contexts.

    Cultivating Sustainable Construction: Stakeholder Insights Driving Circular Economy Innovation for Inclusive Resource Equity · 2024 · DOI

  • The latter finding, however, might be part of the systematic gap in the knowledge of circular economy, and further research in this domain is therefore needed.

    Architectural Perspectives on Wood Reuse within Circular Construction: A South–Central European Study · 2024 · DOI

  • A limitation of this study was the difficulty in gaining a reflective sample of participants to best reflect the Italian AEC sector.

    Designing for a Circular Economy in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Industry: Insights from Italy · 2024 · DOI

  • Future research could explore the dynamics of SR in specific areas or types of UR projects by collecting and analyzing more refined data.

    Exploring the Evolution Mechanisms of Social Risks Associated with Urban Renewal from the Perspective of Stakeholders · 2024 · DOI

  • Lastly, further research into the cost dynamics of certification, particularly as sustainable materials and construction techniques evolve, would provide practical insights for stakeholders.

    Sustainability Certifications in Real Estate: Value and Perception · 2024 · DOI

  • Despite governmental efforts to enhance housing affordability since the early 2000s, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

    The Synergy of Community, Government, and Circular Economy in Shaping Social Housing Policies · 2024 · DOI

  • The findings are still limited by the small resident and designer samples and by the use of only three cases in Beijing.

    Framework for Evaluating the Adaptability of Multi-Unit Housing for Sustainable Residential Development: Operationalization and Preliminary Evaluation Based on Beijing Case Studies · 2026 · DOI

  • It addresses gap in understanding how global sustainability norms may be taken up by a profession traditionally focused on cost management, in a setting where institutional pressures remain limited.

    Building capacity in institutional voids: carbon competency development among quantity surveyors in Nigeria’s weak institutional environment · 2026 · DOI

  • The results obtained in this study may shed light on how to use the LEED-EB system to improve the energy efficiency of historic or heritage buildings. According to ELDib, LEED-EB emphasizes operational energy improvements rather than major renovations, allowing historic or heritage buildings to remain functional and efficient.

    Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for LEED Version 4 (LEED-EB v4) Gold Certification Strategies for Existing Buildings in the United States: A Case Study · 2025 · DOI

  • Also, the taxonomy is derived from a single convenience sample drawn from one metropolitan area and has not been tested on an independent sample; the assignment of variables displaying secondary loadings close in magnitude to their primary loadings is provisional, since a different sample could plausibly reassign them; the third component was retained on a narrow margin, its observed eigenvalue exceeding…

    Risks Associated with Green Building Projects in a Developing Country: An Empirically Derived Taxonomy for Lagos State, Nigeria · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research should focus on integrating emerging technologies, such as smart building management systems…

    A Comparative Study of the Latest Editions of China–Japan–US Green Building Evaluation Standards · 2024 · DOI

  • Indicates severity of service disruptions Reflects public perception…

    Sustainability Indicators and Urban Decision-Making: A Multi-Layer Framework for Evidence-Based Urban Governance · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Sustainable Building Design and Assessment

Most recent work

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Open questions raised by papers listed on this page include: (1) Future research should examine how sustainable practices vary across countries and identify the most effective strategies for contractors to implement locally to improve the uptake of sustainability in building construction (“Sustainable Practices for Building Construction in New Zealand”, 2026); (2) Lack of understanding of barriers, strategies, and motivations influencing CE implementation (“Implementing circular economy in housing redevelopment project: a case study in…”, 2026); (3) It addresses gap in understanding how global sustainability norms may be taken up by a profession traditionally focused on cost management, in a setting where institutional pressures remain limited (“Building capacity in institutional voids: carbon competency development among…”, 2026); (4) Future research should focus on optimising LEED evaluation criteria by addressing the application of insulation suited to distinct climate conditions (“LEED Certification in Building Energy Efficiency: A Review of Its Performance…”, 2025); (5) Future research could explore strategies to amplify these benefits, encouraging the widespread adoption of energy-efficient retrofitting practices across Europe and beyond (“Increasing the Market Value of Buildings Through Energy Retrofitting: A…”, 2025). 405 gap statements have been mined from Sustainable Building Design and Assessment papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 1,638 papers on the topic; the gaps come from whichever of those papers state one. They are mostly the research gaps the authors state and the papers' abstracts, plus future-work, limitations and challenges passages. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one, so you can read the original claim in context.

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