Sustainable Construction and Development (FutureLearn)

You’ll explore the need for environmental, economic and social sustainability, and the implications for the construction industry.

You’ll learn best practices from successful sustainability initiatives, and understand the challenge of achieving sustainability in the future.

What topics will you cover?

- The complexities of sustainability in construction and development of the built assets, together with challenges, importance, and impact of role performance.

- Environmental sustainability in construction and development of built assets, and the important roles of innovations, professionalism, ethics, culture and procurement practices and regulations.

- Economic sustainability and the roles of effective business cases, organisational size, dynamics of networks & integrated delivery; and procurement practices.

- Social sustainability in construction and development of built assets, and the roles of construction processes, outputs and outcomes on people and society.

- Lessons learned from good and best practices in sustainability, and how these could be embraced and taken-up, together with challenges and appropriate guidelines for implementation.

- Future challenges in sustainable development based on possible scenarios considering the level of success of current mitigation and adaptation measures.

Learning on this course

You can take this self-guided course and learn at your own pace. On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you'll be able to...

- Demonstrate understanding of the complexities of sustainability from generic and project specific perspectives, and the obligations of stakeholders.

- Evaluate the environmental considerations of sustainability and their implications on construction processes and practices

- Evaluate economic considerations of sustainability and their implications on construction processes and practices.

- Evaluate social considerations of sustainability and their implications on construction processes and practices.

- Demonstrate knowledge of lessons learned from good practices of sustainability initiatives, and better understand how these could be implemented in projects.

- Explain the nature of the task of attaining sustainability in the built environment in future, considering the most likely future scenario of the sustainable development agenda.

Who is the course for?

This course is for anyone interested in sustainable construction and development, but may be of particular interest to those working in or studying construction and the wider built environment.