موانع بحرانی برای پذیرش فناوری ساختمان سبز در کشورهای در حال توسعه: مورد غنا Critical barriers to green building technologies adoption in developing countries: The case of Ghana

1. Introduction It is widely accepted that the construction industry has harmful impacts on the environment, economy, and society. The construction industry consumes up to 40% of the total energy and 39 accounts for up to 30% of the total annual greenhouse gas emissions at the global level (United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 2011). The construction industry is also considered a resource-intensive industry that consumes about 70% of the cement products and 25% of the steel products in many countries (Wang and Zhang, 2008). Due to a growing public concern about these impacts nowadays, much attention has been paid to implementing sustainability or sustainable development within the construction industry. According to the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987), “sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Sustainable development has three dimensions, i.e., environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Green building has been well received by governments around the world as a strategy for improving the sustainability of the construction industry (Shen et al., 2017a). Green building is considered “the practice of creating structures and using processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building’s lifecycle” (US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), 2016). It has been viewed as an effective alternative to traditional building, which has a significant role in reducing or eliminating the negative impacts of construction activities on the environment and climate change (Hwang et al., 2016; World Green Building Council (WorldGBC), 2017a). However, green building is not achievable without the adoption of green building technologies (GBTs). In this study, GBTs are defined as technologies that are incorporated into building design and construction to make the end product sustainable (Ahmad et al., 2016). Several GBTs, such as green roof technology, solar technology, and prefabricated concrete technology, have been introduced for developing green projects. Adopting these GBTs offers a range of significant sustainability benefits that are not likely to be derived from adopting traditional building technologies. It was reported by the UNEP (2009) that with the adoption of appropriate GBTs, a 30-80% cut in building energy consumption is attainable. Moreover, numerous researchers and organizations have indicated that GBTs adoption provides several other environmental, economic, and social benefits, such as increased water efficiency, improved productivity, enhanced human health and wellbeing, improved indoor environmental quality, and higher property value (WorldGBC, 2017b; Darko et al., 2017a, b).