The gold open access journal Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, owned and run by society publisher IOP Publishing is running a focus issue and the Guest Editors are welcoming research Papers, Topical Reviews, and Perspective articles.
Recent Advancements in Environmental Assessments in the Built Environment
https://iopscience.iop.org/collections/eris-250402-812
Submission deadline: 30 November 2025 (flexible and may be extended into 2026).
The built environment is responsible for a major share of the anthropogenic climate impact and of many other environmental aspects such as air pollution, material and energy use. Urbanization is among the most influential global scale societal changes, and depending on the way the built environmental develops, the shift to cities alone might either consume the entire remaining carbon budget for the next 0.5 degrees C warming or play a leading role in solving the climate emergency. Owners, planners, architects, engineers, and manufacturers are all invested in delivering sustainable buildings and infrastructure.
The Guest Editors revisit a historic focus issue in the IOP Publishing journal Environmental Research Letters on Environmental Assessments in the Built Environment hosted in 2013-2014, to assess the state-of-the-art of environmental assessments in the built environment context. While recognizing significant methodological and data development steps have been taken within the past 10 years, they argue that the closing Editorial in 2014 “Environmental assessments in the built environment: crucial yet underdeveloped” still holds true, and in some fields more than in others.
Submissions which look at the development of the environmental assessment methods in the built environment context, develop these methods, and/or evaluate the level of maturity of theirs are encouraged, covering a range of subjects:
- Urban metabolism and environmental assessment of cities/urban systems;
- Environmental benefits of innovative designs, materials, and building techniques;
- Embedded energy, GHGs, water and other environmental impacts of the built environment;
- Integration of environmental and social indicators in urban assessment methods;
- Adaptive reuse, circularity, and other techniques for prolonging built infrastructure lifetimes;
- Innovations in modeling built infrastructure, including remote sensing, computer vision, AI, synthetic data, and others
- Carbon budgets and allocations in the built environment;
- Carbon and other environmental handprints in the built environment.
Guest Editors
- Matthew Eckelman, Northeastern University, USA
- Jukka Heinonen, University of Iceland, Iceland
- Seppo Junnila, Aalto University, Finland
Manuscript submission information:
- Submit via the online submission form.
- Choose ‘Focus on Recent Advancements in Environmental Assessments in the Built Environment’from the drop-down menu.
- All articles published in ERIS are completely free to read in perpetuity, and the journal is funded solely by article publication charges. The standard article publication charge can be found
- Various discounts, waivers and funding arrangements are available to support our authors; visit the paying for open access pageto find out whether you qualify.
- For any queries related to the focus issue, including the suitability of the paper for the journal, publication fee, or submission deadline, please contact the journal Publisher Lauren Carter (carter@ioppublishing.org).
