Is adaptation sustainable? A method to estimate climate‐critical construction resource capacity

Abstract

Purpose

Though production rates for construction materials are generally available, potential capacity on a global scale is poorly understood. Commencement of infrastructure projects to address climate change, such as dikes and levees, could increase demand making critical resources scarce. Since increasing production capacity of scarce products can be a challenge, understanding current potential capacity is an imperative. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new method to assess capacity and to create one such global estimate for cement.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed global hybrid method creates a global estimate of cement production capacity in four steps: collect capacity and production data from existing reports; select top regional capacity holders; compute regional utilisation; back‐calculate capacity from production.

Findings

The method overcomes shortfalls of other methods, but – like all estimating methods – is inherently limited by the amount of data available. It nonetheless provides economists, climate change scientists, government officials, investors, and other researchers a better understanding of current maximum global cement capacity.

Originality/value

Most studies only focus on industry demand and actual production, because these forces drive commodity pricing. Capacity is generally estimated either through surveying goods‐producing industries at the plant level or examining economic data. Methods that employ these types of analysis are useful for regional estimates of production, but are ineffective at the global scale.

Citation

Fu, E., Newell, D., Becker, A., Schwegler, B. and Fischer, M. (2013), "Is adaptation sustainable? A method to estimate climate‐critical construction resource capacity", Construction Innovation, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 202-216. https://doi.org/10.1108/14714171311322165