A Comparative Review of Alternative Methods for Addressing Sustainability and Environmental Impact in Earthquake Engineering

In earthquake-prone regions, the damages to buildings with insufficient seismic capacity result in repair and reconstruction processes that also incur significant environmental losses. Increasing environmental awareness is also shaping research in the field of earthquake engineering. In risk assessment studies, approaches that address environmental impacts have been developed, and this issue is gaining more attention worldwide particularly in the case of long-term decisions related to the built environment. In this context, the environmental impacts of buildings are examined under two main headings: initial impacts resulting from the construction process and the impacts caused by repair or reconstruction processes following seismic damage. This study discusses various approaches to evaluating these impacts in the literature and presents a comparative analysis of the existing methods. It is observed that studies examining seismic risk and environmental impacts largely represent building stocks from specific countries. It has been found that most of the existing research is conducted at the individual building scale, with limited studies addressing the issue at the regional level. This proceeding provides a comprehensive review of the existing research on the topic, and presents a discussion on the development of an environmental risk assessment approach based on group-based renewal.