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1. Introduction
Sustainable development has been internationally agreed as a key goal for policy makers to guide development at global, national and local levels ([84] Singh et al. , 2009). The [97] World Economic Forum (2011, p. 11) identifies the building sector as an area which needs to be addressed because it accounts for "40% of the world's energy use, 40% of carbon output and consumes 20% of available water". The large use of electricity in buildings has been identified as one of the main culprits for high emissions across the globe. The [14] Centre for International Economics Canberra and Sydney (2007) reports that 23 per cent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in Australia come from the energy demand of the building sector, while the US Green Building Council ([91] USGBC, 2011) claims that both residential and commercial buildings account for 39 per cent of total emissions in the USA, and more than any other country in the world except China.
The increased recognition that buildings are substantial carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emitters ([74] Reed et al. , 2009; [90] Ürge-Vorsatz and Novikova, 2008; [12] Buchanan and Honey, 1994; [56] Levermore, 2008), and contribute significantly to climate change, puts pressure on construction industry practitioners to incorporate sustainability goals aside from the traditional project goals of cost, time and quality ([29] Fernández-Sánchez and Rodríguez-López, 2010). Translating sustainability goals into action at the project level is complicated by the individual characteristics of countries, their cultures, climates and types of buildings ([89] Ugwu and Haupt, 2007).
Against this background, there is a widely recognised need to identify metrics and tools that would help articulate the extent to which current activities are either sustainable or not sustainable ([84] Singh et al. , 2009). This has been the key motivator for the development and increased popularity of sustainability reporting tools (SRTs) in the building sector and the civil engineering infrastructure sector. Infrastructure includes transport (roads and bridges, bus and cycle ways, footpaths, railways), water (sewage and drainage, water storage and supply), energy (transmission and distribution) and communication (transmission and distribution) among others ([2] AGIC, 2012). This paper provides a review of available tools used to assess and report sustainability in the infrastructure and building sectors. The tools...