Renard Siew

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The paper presents the impact of ESG (environmental, social and governance) practices on the financial performance of companies listed in Australian Securities Exchange. ESG scores for 2008 to2010 are derived from the research work conducted by Corporate Analysis Enhanced Responsibility (CAER). Financial performance is measured using a range of...

A key challenge of engineering education is to teach multifaceted content while actively engaging students with different learning preferences. The authors present an approach to synergize journaling, engineering sketching and in-class quizzing as tools to foster active learning, deeper understanding and the development of critical engineering skil...

In today’s teaching environment where students’ main focus is on getting a high mark for a class, deep understanding has taken a backseat. Being able to answer as many exam preparation questions as possible and fulfilling all the criteria on an assignment will guarantee success. “I deserve a higher mark because I worked hard in this class,” are the...

Purpose – Buildings/infrastructure are recognised to have a significant impact on the environment and the community, and hence there is pressure on industry practitioners to incorporate environmental and social considerations in addition to the traditional cost, time and quality. The development of sustainability reporting tools (SRTs) to assist in...

Purpose – Over recent years, a number of companies have committed to sharing information relating to their environmental, social and governance (ESG) activities, in response to a higher demand for transparency from stakeholders. This paper aims to explore the impact of such reporting on the financial performance of construction companies. Design/m...

This chapter explores some of the tools that can be used to aid in making complex sustainability decisions. Often, there are many factors that are involved. The tools explored here such as cost–benefit analysis, risk and opportunity, multicriteria decision making and big data analytics are often used to guide the decision making process. There are...

Most entities would have to consider the different types of risks that emerge and address them to avoid further disruptions to their operations. This chapter unpacks the concept of sustainability risks and illustrates examples of different policies/instruments to deal with them across multiple jurisdictions.

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure”. With the increasing demand from stakeholders to be more transparent on sustainability reporting, a range of analytical tools have proliferated across the globe to provide guidance on this matter. This chapter frames existing tools by frameworks, standards as well as rating and indices to help leaders navig...

This chapter provides a summary of the other 9 chapters in this book and how they interlink with each other. It outlines the usefulness of different areas explored to stakeholders and highlights future research direction.

Sustainability analytics is fast becoming a buzzword across the globe and is perhaps one of the most discussed topics among leaders today. This chapter explores the concept of sustainability analytics, why the need to focus on it and the mindset (three principles) required to evaluate, discuss and shape our approach in leveraging on this powerful t...

Sustainability communication is critical to ensuring that available data or information is translated into useful knowledge and can aid decision making. In this section, we will be exploring different communication models, common challenges faced and how they can most effectively be applied in the field of sustainability.

It has been estimated that to meet the aspirations of the SDGs, developing countries especially will face a financing gap of $2.5 trillion per year. Public sector contributions will remain indispensable but this may be insufficient to meet the demands across all SDG-related sectors. This will require a step change in private sector contributions wh...

Effective stakeholder engagement is important to ensure that the concerns of all relevant parties are addressed and that ‘no one is left behind’ in line with the principles of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This is a key step in making sense of sustainability data collected and would help with better interpretation as well as decision ma...

The building and infrastructure sector has been labelled as instrumental in helping to meet the aspirations of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This chapter takes a deeper dive into the analysis of tools and frameworks to guide the development of green and more sustainable buildings/infrastructure. There are obvious parallels that can be d...

There is a growing interest in the private sector to report on sustainability issues over the past decade. This in part is driven by the increasing demand of stakeholders for higher levels of transparency and global sustainability activism. Yet, the narrative on performance has largely been focused on profitability ratios to evaluate the overall fi...

This chapter explores a wide range of sustainability issues confronting the world today through an analytics angle, in particular what frameworks or tools exist within each of the subject areas, how it concerns other entities, what to measure and how to measure them. The different tools and frameworks to analyse sustainability issues across the env...

In today's information age, both excess and lack of information can cause a disaster. COVID-19 pandemic not only highlighted the significance of risk communication but also pointed out several unintended and distressing consequences due to information gaps and miscommunications. Despite facing a common threat, the local communities suffered differe...

Businesses around the world are being asked to be more open about climate-change risks by adopting the best-practice guidelines of the international Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures. The property and construction sector contributes more than 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, yet not much is known about how these compa...

The property and construction industry are known to be a main contributor to climate change contributing more than 40% of the world's emissions. In direct response to this, there has been a call for corporations to be more transparent and align themselves to the requirements of the task force for climate financial disclosures (TCFD). This paper see...

The property and construction sector is known to be a laggard in the adoption of sustainability practices, possibly due to its fragmented nature. Yet there is an increasing demand from key stakeholders, such as institutional investors, as well as civil society, for greater transparency on sustainability disclosures. This paper highlights a case stu...

Over the past decade, the concept of circular economy (CE) has emerged encouraging a rethinking of the way products are designed so that they can be “made to be made again”, turning the conveyor belt of consumerism into a circle (a closed-loop supply chain) and hence eliminate waste. The construction sector, especially, is known to be one of the ma...

There is an increasing demand from stakeholders for higher transparency on environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosures. Yet not much is known about the state of sustainability reporting in Malaysia especially in the property and construction industry. This paper aims to fill this gap accordingly. Content analysis of corporate websites, s...

Relatively few tools have explored beyond the boundaries of buildings to consider also the sustainability of a township or its surrounding communities. This paper focuses on introducing the Green Township Index (GTI), developed by a leading Malaysian property development company. GTI is an amalgamation of a few other frameworks, such as the Global...

This paper provides a commentary on the latest research in measuring the sustainability of buildings and its wider application. The emergence of sustainability rating tools (SRTs) has faced critique from scholars due to their deficiencies such as the overemphasis on environmental criteria, the negligence of uncertainty in scoring and existence of n...

Purpose Population ageing is expected to have an increasing impact on the economy and society. In particular, it creates a myriad of challenges for stakeholders in the construction and property sectors. The design of the built environment would now need to consider the requirements of the older population in the community. This paper aims to provid...

This paper investigates the impact of ESG disclosures and institutional ownership on market information asymmetry for 683 firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange for years 2007–2011. Overall, the results suggest that there is a statistically significant negative relationship between ESG disclosures and bid-ask spread and that the presence of in...

The development of sustainability assessment and sustainability reporting tools (SRTs) for infrastructure is pivotal because they serve to inform on progress towards achieving sustainability goals. However, the assessment of sustainability can be improved. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the deficiencies and limitations of existin...

Traditionally, project management is focused on outcomes such as quality, time and cost, with little consideration for environmental and social issues. While project management maturity has been discussed at length in the literature, there is currently a paucity of research exploring ways to embed sustainability into project management. Being able...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the use of Markov chain to predict the behaviour of Australian real estate investment trusts (REITs) that are more highly valued in the areas of environmental, social and governance (ESG). Design/methodology/approach – For the empirical analysis, states is defined as the price interval between 10-d...

The construction sector lags other industries when it comes to the implementation of sustainability. This paper highlights some of the key barriers in implementing sustainability within the construction industry sector and proposes recommendations to address them. The paper suggests that the four main barriers faced by the construction industry in...

The accident statistics for the construction industry remain high when compared to other industries. This is not surprising given the fragmented nature of this industry and the involvement of multiple stakeholders in a project. Poor communication on health and safety (HandS) related issues has been identified as a major cause of incidents/accidents...

Sustainability reporting has been increasingly adopted by corporations worldwide given the demand of stakeholders for greater transparency on both environmental and social issues. The popularity of such reporting is evidenced by the development of a range of tools in the last two decades - Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), AA1000 and Carbon Disclo...

Purpose – This paper aims to share the success story of a residential college based in Australia through a case study approach. Design/methodology/approach – The paper discusses the setup of the college in terms of its management structure, demographics of residents, sustainability initiatives and the resident life programs which run every semeste...

Traditionally, project management is focussed on outcomes such as quality, time and cost, with little consideration for environmental and social issues. While project management maturity has been discussed at length in the literature, there is currently a paucity of research exploring ways to embed sustainability into project management. Being able...

The transition to a sustainable economy is inevitable as population and consumption continue to grow, ecosystems decline as a result of increased business activity and resources are stretched to a limit. The survival of businesses is very much dependent on their ability to adapt and transition to a business model that addresses important sustainabi...

This paper presents a new conceptual model for feasibility study of projects incorporating sustainability criteria. Large construction projects have an important influence on the attainment of sustainable development indices. Some of these projects particularly in developing countries have not sufficiently considered sustainability issues even with...

Construction project portfolio management has a large impact on many companies as they are often confronted with having more projects to select from than the resources available to execute them. Selecting the wrong projects will lead to wasted resources and loss of benefits which may have been gained by focussing on other projects. While there have...

The integrated reporting (IR) framework provides guidance to consider actively the relationships between a company's operating, functional units and the different capitals it uses or affects. It can help the construction industry achieve sustainability goals through integrated decision-making and actions that consider the creation of value over the...

Sustainability reporting tools (SRTs) for Communities is part of a new paradigm to aid local governments and councils in their decision making process. These integrative tools have evolved from prior versions of SRTs that focus purely on a single building performance to consider the sustainability performance of communities. This paper provides a r...

Sustainability reporting tools (SRTs) have proliferated in order to meet the demand of stakeholders for higher transparency on environmental and social issues. Despite the increasing reliance on SRTs in decision making, much is still unknown about their effectiveness. If SRTs prove to be ineffective, they may pose a serious obstacle to sustainable...

The Green Building Fund (GBF) established in 2008 as part of the Clean Business Australia initiative is aimed at mitigating the risk of climate change by forming close partnerships between government, business and industry. It is specifically targeted to reduce the impact of the built environment on Australia's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by red...

While environmental sustainability has been the subject of much debate in the last decade, it was not until recently that attention started to shift towards human resource management as an enabler for sustainability. Yet, this is still a relatively under researched area. Much is still unknown about the role of an individual worker in contributing t...

Purpose – Buildings/infrastructure are recognised to have a significant impact on the environment and the community, and hence there is pressure on industry practitioners to incorporate environmental and social considerations in addition to the traditional cost, time and quality. The development of sustainability reporting tools (SRTs) to assist in...

Purpose – Over recent years, a number of companies have committed to sharing information relating to their environmental, social and governance (ESG) activities, in response to a higher demand for transparency from stakeholders. This paper aims to explore the impact of such reporting on the financial performance of construction companies. Design/m...

The paper presents the results of an empirical study of the impact of ESG on the financial performance of the top 300 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The listed companies are categorised into major industry sectors - construction, banking and financial services, mining, food and beverage, media, travel and leisure, energy and uti...

HRM is one of the most poorly understood areas in construction management despite an increasing recognition of its importance.This paper discusses the results of a survey conducted across 78 publicly-listed Australian and Malaysian construction companies. Relative Importance Index (RII) was used to determine the most dominant HRM configuration util...