Sustainable development factors in building engineering systems: do demographic factors matter?

Sustainable engineering builds systems, products, and processes that are socially, environmentally, and economically viable to fulfil the promise of a balanced approach to achieve the net zero emission targets of the world to mitigate climate change impacts. Owing to the multidisciplinary nature of sustainable development, sustainability efforts involve concepts, principles, and methods from engineering, social sciences, economics, social psychology, biological sciences, ecology, and physical sciences. Hence, scientific analysis is required to define inter-item relationships and identify differences based on the demographic features of professionals. The lack of such studies in the literature represents the main gap covered by this study. In this context, a methodology was designed and applied by surveying 101 professionals from various engineering disciplines in the UAE’s construction sector. The results confirmed a significant correlation among sociocultural (SOC), economic (ECO), and environmental (ENV) sustainability factors. The findings revealed that the distributions of SOC, ECO, and ENV were the same across gender, specialisation, and experience categories. Moreover, the distributions of ECO and ENV were the same across age categories, except for the distribution of SOC, which differed across age categories, favouring groups over 25 years of age. These findings would support stakeholders in the construction sector in developing sustainable engineering building systems. The proposed methodology can be used in other areas to help stakeholders establish sustainable systems based on the SOC, ECO, and ENV factors.