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This guide presents techniques for evaluating manufacturing investments from the perspective of environmentally sustainable manufacturing by pairing economic methods of investment analysis with environmental aspect of manufacturing, including manufacturing processes. The methods are based on ASTM E3200 and, although the focus is on manufacturing, they can be applied under other circumstances (e.g., construction industry investments, agriculture, or mining). The economic techniques include net present value, internal rate of return, payback period, and hurdle rate. The guide also includes sensitivity analyses with a focus on Monte Carlo techniques. The methods presented can be used by manufacturers, regardless of size or complexity, to make environmentally sustainable decisions, including but not limited to whether to embark on an investment, discontinue a manufacturing line, invest or re-invest in a new project or factory.

Building from considerable empirical research in the general business literature, this paper quantitatively explores the view that the benefits of information technologies manifest themselves through improvement in work processes. In turn, better work processes lead to increased project performance. Using an overall sample of 133 projects (missing data make specific correlation sample sizes smaller) from the Construction Industry Institute Benchmarking and Metrics database, this paper analyzes correlations between technology use and integration, best practices, and project performance measured with cost, schedule, and rework metrics. Data are also used to assess the complementary interaction between technology use, work processes as measured by best practices, and performance. The findings show that there are limited significant beneficial correlations between information technology use and performance, slightly more significant beneficial correlations between best practice use and performance, an...

Residential structure fires pose a significant risk to life and property. A major source of these fires is the ignition of upholstered furniture by cigarettes. It has long been established that cigarettes and other lighted tobacco products could ignite upholstered furniture and were a leading cause of fire deaths in residences. In recent years, states have adopted fire standard compliant cigarettes ('FSC cigarettes') that are made with a wrapping paper that contains regularly spaced bands, which increases the likelihood of self-extinguishment. This paper measures the effectiveness of FSC cigarettes on the number of residential fires involving upholstered furniture, and the resulting fatalities, injuries, and extent of flame spread, while accounting for the under-reporting of fire incidents. In total, four models were estimated using fire department data from 2002 to 2011. The results provide evidence that FSC cigarettes, on average, reduced the number of residential fires by 45 %, reduced fatalities by 23 %, and extent of flame spread by 27 % in 2011. No effect on injuries was found. Within each state, effectiveness is moderated by the number of smokers and their consumption patterns. In general, FSC cigarettes are more effective in places with a large smoking population who engage in heavier smoking. There is a very limited effect on the lightest of smokers, suggesting behavioral differences between heavy and light smokers that influence fire risk.

Residential fire sprinklers have long proven themselves as life-safety technologies to the fire service community. Yet, about 1% of all one- and two-family dwelling fires occur in homes protected by sprinklers. It has been argued that measured sprinkler performance has ignored factors confounding the relationship between sprinkler use and performance. In this analysis, sprinkler performance is measured by comparing 'like' structure fires, while conditioning on smoke detection technology and neighborhood housing and socioeconomic conditions, using propensity score matching. Results show that residential fire sprinklers protect occupant and firefighter health and safety, and are comparable to other life-safety technologies. Language: en

This paper investigated whether greater tree-canopy cover is associated with reduced risk of poor birth outcomes in Portland, Oregon. Residential addresses were geocoded and linked to classified-aerial imagery to calculate tree-canopy cover in 50, 100, and 200 m buffers around each home in our sample (n=5696). Detailed data on maternal characteristics and additional neighborhood variables were obtained from birth certificates and tax records. We found that a 10% increase in tree-canopy cover within 50 m of a house reduced the number of small for gestational age births by 1.42 per 1000 births (95% CI-0.11-2.72). Results suggest that the natural environment may affect pregnancy outcomes and should be evaluated in future research.

Few studies have estimated the effect of environmental amenities on the rental price of houses. We address this gap in the literature by quantifying the effect of urban trees on the rental price of single-family homes in Portland, Oregon, USA. We found that an additional tree on a house's lot increased monthly rent by $5.62, and a tree in the public right of way increased rent by $21.00. These results are consistent with a previous hedonic analysis of the effects of trees on the sales price of homes in Portland, which suggests that homeowners and renters place similar values on urban trees.

In criminology, it is well understood that indicators of urban decay, such as abandoned buildings littered with broken windows, provide criminals with signals identifying neighborhoods with lower crime detection and apprehension rates than better maintained neighborhoods. Whether it is the resident population’s sense of apathy, lack of civic pride, or fear of confrontation that causes criminals to perceive an easy mark, it nevertheless emboldens them to strike. Previous research of wildland arson hints that broken windows (e.g., areas of criminal activity) are partly responsible for arson outbreaks within the wildland–urban interface. We model the incidence of wildland and non-wildland arson ignitions in Michigan from 2001 to 2005 as a function of constructed Broken Windows indices. Our results suggest that crime prevention and urban revitalization programs may be as valuable as fire suppression, fuels management, and law enforcement in limiting incidence and the damage from both wildland and non-wildland arson.

We use a hedonic price model to simultaneously estimate the effects of street trees on the sales price and the time-on-market (TOM) of houses in Portland, Oregon. On average, street trees add $8870 to sales price and reduce TOM by 1.7 days. In addition, we found that the benefits of street trees spill over to neighboring houses. Because the provision and maintenance of street trees in Portland is the responsibility of adjacent property owners, our results suggest that if the provision of street trees is left solely to homeowners, then there will be too few street trees from a societal perspective.

We estimated the effect of shade trees on the summertime electricity use of 460 single-family homes in Sacramento, California. Results show that trees on the west and south sides of a house reduce summertime electricity use, whereas trees on the north side of a house increase summertime electricity use. The current level of tree cover on the west and south sides of houses in our sample reduced summertime electricity use by 185 kWh (5.2%), whereas north-side trees increased electricity use by 55 kWh (1.5%). Results also show that a London plane tree, planted on the west side of a house, can reduce carbon emissions from summertime electricity use by an average of 31% over 100 years.

A benefit–cost analysis is performed to measure the expected present value net benefits (PVNB) resulting from the installation of a residential fire sprinkler system in a newly constructed, single-family house. The benefits and costs associated with installation and use of a fire sprinkler system are compared across three prototypical single-family house types: colonial, townhouse, and ranch. Each of the house types varies by design, size, and fire sprinkler affordability. Six fire sprinkler system designs are evaluated: a multipurpose network system, three stand-alone systems, and two stand-alone systems equipped with a backflow preventer. The sprinkler designs vary by installation cost (materials and labor cost) and required annual maintenance, but all were designed to meet the NFPA 13D standard. The estimated benefits of fire sprinklers include reductions in the following: the risk of civilian fatalities and injuries, homeowner insurance premiums, uninsured direct property losses, and uninsured indirect costs. Results show that residential sprinkler systems not requiring expensive annual upkeep or maintenance are economical. The expected PVNB in 2005 dollars is estimated as $2,967 for the colonial-style house, $3,099 for the townhouse, and $4,166 for the ranch-style house, given installation of the lowest life-cycle cost sprinkler system in each of the house types. A sensitivity analysis that measures the variability of the results to changes in the modeling assumptions confirms the robustness of the baseline analysis.

This paper examines the effect wildfire mitigation has on broad-scale wildfire behavior. Each year, hundreds of million of dollars are spent on fire suppression and fuels management applications, yet little is known, quantitatively, of the returns to these programs in terms of their impact on wildfire extent and intensity. This is especially true when considering that wildfire management influences and reacts to several, often times confounding factors, including socioeconomic characteristics, values at risk, heterogeneous landscapes, and climate. Due to the endogenous nature of suppression effort and fuels management intensity and placement with wildfire behavior, traditional regression models may prove inadequate. Instead, I examine the applicability of propensity score matching (PSM) techniques in modeling wildfire. This research makes several significant contributions including: (1) applying techniques developed in labor economics and in epidemiology to evaluate the effects of natural resource policies on landscapes, rather than on individuals; (2) providing a better understanding of the relationship between wildfire mitigation strategies and their influence on broad-scale wildfire patterns; (3) quantifying the returns to suppression and fuels management on wildfire behavior.

Drought conditions in much of the West, increased residential development, and elevated fuels from a century of wildfire suppression have increased wildfire risk in the United States. In light of this increased risk, an innovative wildfire risk education program in Colorado Springs was examined, which rated the wildfire risk of 35,000 homes in the city’s wildlandurban interface. Evidence from home sales before and after the program’s implementation suggests that the program was successful at changing homebuyer’s attitudes toward wildfire risk, particularly preferences for flammable building materials.

In 2000, concerned about the risks of wildfires to local homes, the Colorado Springs Fire Department rated the wildfire risk of 35,000 housing parcels within the wildland-urban interface and made its findings available online. We examine the effectiveness of this rating project by comparing the relationship between home price and wildfire risk before and after the information was posted on the Web site. Before the information was available, home price and wildfire risk were positively correlated, whereas, afterwards, they were not.

Our article considers the economic contributions of forest ecosystem services, using a case study from Flores, Indonesia, in which forest protection in upstream watersheds stabilize soil and hydrological flows in downstream farms. We focus on the demand for a weak complement to the ecosystem services—farm labor—and account for spatial dependence due to economic interactions, ecosystem processes, and data integration. The estimated models have theoretically expected properties across eight different specifications. We find strong evidence that forest ecosystem services provide economically substantive benefits to local people and that these services would be substantially undervalued if spatial dependence is ignored. Forests provide an array of ecosystem services by sequestering carbon, maintaining habitat and biodiversity, stabilizing hydrological flows, mitigating soil erosion, and improving microclimates. Deforestation and forest degradation can irreversibly and substantively impair these ecosystem functions. This raises the question of why society and governments would allow rapid or excessive deforestation. One reason is the failure to consider the full range of goods and services provided by the forests, particularly any latent and complex ecosystem services (Dasgupta). The economic contributions of forest ecosystem services are not well understood and rarely quantified. This article illustrates a method for estimating the value of watershed services from protected tropical forests in Flores, Indonesia. Specifically, we respond to three challenges posed in the literature. First, valuation studies have typically overlooked livelihood values of natural resources in developing countries, focusing largely on amenity values in developed countries (Deacon et al., Dasgupta). Second, a detailed consideration of the spatial aspects of ecosystems and ecological processes, such

The Applied Economics Office (AEO) of the Engineering Laboratory (EL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed the Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) database, which estimates the sustainability (energy, economic, and environmental) performance for eleven commercial building prototypes designed to different energy efficiency levels. Analysis of the BIRDS database estimates both the average percentage change in energy consumption and the aggregate changes in energy consumption for one year’s worth of new construction for each U.S. state. Due to the limited publically-available new construction data, the estimates are calculated by giving equal weighting to all the cities in a state that are included in the BIRDS database. However, such an approach leads to underweighting the importance of cities with more new construction and overweighting cities with less new construction. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of implementing a non-equal weighting approach on state-level energy consumption impacts of adopting a more restrictive state energy code. New construction floor area completion data for 2012 was obtained for each county in the United States to assist in increasing the accuracy of these impact estimates.

The absence of a comprehensive and accurate database on fire occurrence means that some proportion of wildfires is not reported. This paper examines wildfires reported in the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) database and compares it with the satellite-based Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) fire detection data and the CAL FIRE Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP) geodatabase to understand underreporting of wildland fires in the NFIRS system. The paper discusses a series of large wildland fires and uses a Generalised Linear Model to identify the conditions where large wildfires go unreported. This paper shows that the NFIRS database, which is the primary fire database in the US, significantly underreports wildland fires. Evidence from California suggests that 32% of fires within local jurisdictions detected via MODIS satellite were identified in the NFIRS database; thus, there could be a significant number of fires going unreported nationwide. Examining eight large fires in California, only 16% of the structures damaged or destroyed, as reported in CAL FIRE, were reported in NFIRS. Areas with underreporting tend to have a higher level of poverty, higher population density, higher level of people without vehicles, lower income and a higher level of single parents with children under 18, as well as a higher level of people under the age of 18.

Public outreach and wildfire education activities have been shown to limit the number of unintentional human-caused ignitions (i.e., ‘accidental’ wildfires). Such activities include the airing of public service announcements, visiting with homeowners in at-risk areas, distributing informative brochures and flyers, hosting of public forums (with presentations), and facilitating community sponsored neighborhood hazard assessments. By limiting the number of ignitions, prevention entirely avoids costs and losses related to fire suppression (initial attack) and property damage. In this paper, we show that the benefits of wildfire prevention education activities carried out in the State of Florida, USA, far outweigh their costs. We also report how the return on wildfire prevention education investment in that State varies—i.e., the effectiveness of these programs varies—with many exogenous factors, including weather, season, and recent wildfire history and fuels management activities. To illustrate how this effectiveness variation could be exploited to increase returns to money spent on prevention, we explore the optimal timing of wildfire prevention activities. Optimal timing of wildfire prevention education spending is defined as the spending allocation over time that yields the lowest wildfire-induced cost plus net value change to society. We find that, for Florida, the optimal (monthly) timing of prevention activities can be forecasted by exploiting the relationships between prevention effectiveness and fire weather measures, which vary predictably within the year.

This paper is built around ASTM E 2506, Standard Guide for Developing a Cost-Effective Risk Mitigation Plan for New and Existing Constructed Facilities. E 2506 establishes a three-step protocol—perform risk assessment, specify combinations of risk mitigation strategies for evaluation, and perform economic evaluation—to insure that the decision maker is provided the requisite information to choose the most cost effective combination of risk mitigation strategies. Because decisions associated with low-probability, high-consequence events involve uncertainty both in terms of appropriate evaluation procedures and event-related measures of likelihood and consequence, NIST developed a Risk Mitigation Toolkit. This paper uses (a) a data center undergoing renovation for improved security, and (b) a PVP-related failure event to illustrate how to perform the E 2506 three-step protocol with particular emphasis on the third step—perform economic evaluation. The third step is built around the Cost-Effectiveness Tool for Capital Asset Protection (CET), which was developed by NIST. Version 4.0 of CET is used to analyze the security- or failure-related event with a focus on consequence estimation and consequence assessment via Monte Carlo techniques. CET 4.0 includes detailed analysis and reporting features designed to identify key cost drivers, measure their impacts, and deliver estimated consequence parameters with uncertainty bounds. Significance of this economics-based intelligence (EI) tool is presented and discussed for security- or failure-consequence estimation to risk assessment of failure of critical structures or components.

iii Preface v Acknowledgements vii Acronyms and Abbreviations xiii Executive Summary xv

Although the construction industry is a major component of the U.S. economy, it has experienced a “perceived” prolonged period of decline in productivity. Due to the critical lack of measurement methods, however, the magnitude of the productivity problem in the construction industry is largely unknown. The measurement problem is exacerbated by the fact that the construction industry is composed of four sectors that differ significantly in the outputs produced, firm size, and use of technology. The four sectors, which taken together define the construction industry, are residential, commercial/institutional, industrial, and infrastructure. This report describes efforts underway that focus on the measurement of construction productivity at three levels—task, project, and industry—and how such measurements can be developed. This report analyzes the measurement challenges associated with the development of meaningful measures of construction productivity at the task, project, and industry levels and establishes a framework for addressing those challenges. Specifically, this report identifies the metrics, tools, and data needed to move forward in collaboration with key construction industry stakeholders. Once produced, these metrics, tools and data will help construction industry stakeholders make more cost-effective investments in productivity enhancing technologies and improved life-cycle construction processes; they will also provide stakeholders with new measurement and evaluation capabilities. Finally, this report lays the foundation for future research and for establishing key industry collaborations that will enable more meaningful measures of construction productivity to be produced at the task, project, and industry levels.

Research shows that some categories of human-ignited wildfires may be forecastable, owing to their temporal clustering, with the possibility that resources could be predeployed to help reduce the incidence of such wildfires. We estimated several kinds of incendiary and other human-ignited wildfire forecast models at the weekly time step for tribal land units in the United States, evaluating their forecast skill out of sample. Analyses show that an autoregressive conditional Poisson model of both incendiary and non-incendiary human-ignited wildfires is more accurate out of sample compared with alternatives, and the simplest of the autoregressive conditional Poisson models performed the best. Additionally, an ensemble of these and simpler, less analytically intensive approaches performed even better. Wildfire hotspot forecast models using all model types were evaluated in a simulation mode to assess the net benefits of forecasts in the context of law-enforcement resource reallocations. Our analyses show that such hotspot tools could yield large positive net benefits for the tribes in terms of suppression expenditures averted for incendiary wildfires but that the hotspot tools were less likely to be beneficial for addressing outbreaks of non-incendiary human-ignited wildfires.

Are we cutting down tropical forests too rapidly and too extensively? If so, why? Answers to both questions are obscured in some ways by insufficient and unreliable data on the economic worth of forest ecosystem services. It is clear, however, that rapid, excessive cutting of forests can irreversibly and substantively impair ecosystem functions, thereby endangering the flow of several socially valuable goods and services from standing forests. One reason for such excessive deforestation is failure to consider the full range of goods and services provided by the forests, particularly latent and complex ecosystem services.

We describe how two important tools of wildfire management, wildfire prevention education and prescribed fire for fuels management, can be coordinated to minimise the combination of management costs and expected societal losses resulting from wildland fire. We present a long-run model that accounts for the dynamics of wildfire, the effects of fuels management on wildfire ignition risk and area burned, and the effects of wildfire prevention education on the ignition risk of human-caused, unintentional wildfires. Based on wildfire management activities in Florida from 2002 to 2007, we find that although wildfire prevention education and prescribed fire have different effects on timing and types of fires, the optimal solution is to increase both interventions. Prescribed fire affects whole landscapes and therefore reduces losses from all wildfire types (including lightning), whereas wildfire prevention education reduces only human-caused ignitions. However, prescribed fire offers a longer-term solution with little short-term flexibility. Wildfire prevention education programs, by comparison, are more flexible, both in time and space, and can respond to unexpected outbreaks, but with limited mitigation longevity. Only when used together in a coordinated effort do we find the costs and losses from unintentional wildfires are minimised.

Wildfires that spread into wildland–urban interface (WUI) communities present significant challenges on several fronts. In the United States, the WUI accounts for a significant portion of wildland fire suppression and wildland fuel treatment costs. Methods to reduce structure losses are focussed on fuel treatments in either wildland fuels or residential fuels. There is a need for a well-characterised, systematic testing of these approaches across a range of community and structure types and fire conditions. Laboratory experiments, field measurements and fire behaviour models can be used to better determine the exposure conditions faced by communities and structures. The outcome of such an effort would be proven fuel treatment techniques for wildland and residential fuels, risk assessment strategies, economic cost analysis models, and test methods with representative exposure conditions for fire-resistant building designs and materials.