Modeling contractors' ecological protection efforts determination for expressway construction projects

Highlights

• A three-step model for determining ecological protection efforts is proposed.

• Model variables are extracted from expressway construction projects' EIA reports.

• Partial least squares structural equation modeling is used for model testing.

• This study supports ecological protection decision-making in an early stage.

Abstract

The negative impacts of expressway construction projects (ECPs) on ecosystems have raised serious concerns globally. While ECP contractors are selective in implementing sustainable construction, they have rarely been informed of making reasonable efforts to address the concerns. This study aims to map out a quantitative analysis approach to aid contractors in determining ecological protection efforts. Four latent variables are included: project features, project perceptions, ecological impact evaluation, and ecological protection decision-making. It is revealed that project perceptions serve as a foundation for effort determination. The determination is built on the relationship between ecological impacts and the intensity of construction activities. Furthermore, the main effort decision is resource consumption. This study addresses decision-making issues pertained to the uptake of sustainability principles in the ECP sector and contributes a three-step framework for anticipating ecological protection efforts in the area of environmental studies.

Introduction

Expressway construction projects (ECPs), which are made up of numerous individual work tasks with predefined delivery objectives (e.g., schedule, cost, and quality), have been a matter of concern in the attainment of environmental sustainability (Karlson et al., 2014). ECPs cause environmental disturbances such as fragmentation, deforestation, habitat loss, and changes to hydrological processes and biomass (Karlson et al., 2014). As disclosed in prior research, part of the disturbances may be remedied immediately, but most of them take a long time to restore (Olander et al., 1998).

ECPs' ecological impacts are all-pervasive (Treweek, 2009), suggesting that contractors must search for effective approaches to assessing and mitigating the impacts. Coffin (2007) proposed a mechanism for manipulating the impacts of road projects on the surrounding environment from the perspective of ecosystems' abiotic and biota components. The proposed mechanism purports to achieve fair resource sharing through stakeholders' joint actions to protect the ecological environment. Nevertheless, aligning all stakeholders around a shared mission poses challenges to governments, clients, and consultants. Specifically, governmental determination to intervene in environmental destruction is weakened by fragmented and overlapping administrative functions (Zhang and Cao, 2015). Clients might have little interest in securing a unified package of resources to minimize environmental degradation due to profit orientation. Consultants are subject to ECP technological and managerial complexities that inhibit them from making reasonable ecological protection efforts.

The performance of ecological protection depends on whether contractors are aware of relevant problems and simplify and streamline the problem solving (Engel et al., 2013; Koppenjan and Enserink, 2009). Unfortunately, ECP contractors usually lack the full capability of making decisions on the input of such efforts, and thus, their joint efforts may not be rewarded as expected. To fill this research gap, the study proposes a model representing contractors' effort determination to protect ECPs' surrounding ecological environment. The research questions guiding this work are three-faceted: How to determine the efforts? What indicators must be included? What relationships these indicators have?

The proposed model is composed of four ecology-related latent variables and twelve indicators (hereafter referred to as ‘indicators’ for simplicity), namely project features (six indicators), project perceptions (three indicators), ecological impact assessment (two indicators), and ecological protection decision-making (one indicator). To validate the proposed model, data from China's ECP sector were collected and analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Besides, we detected the relationships between the four latent variables and the indicators. According to the empirical data analysis, the connectivity between project features and project perception is critical in ecological protection efforts. Thus, the research findings favor practitioners assess the ecological impacts and offer an effective way to decide ecological protection efforts. Furthermore, the theoretical framework underpinning the construction-based model applies to other industrial settings, and the built-in indicators shed light on the framework's generalization.