Achieving and Communicating Sustainability in Geotechnical Design

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainability is a central paradigm of modern society, one which involves a wealth of technical and non-technical disciplines. Geotechnical engineering can contribute to sustainable development through the design, construction, and monitoring of soil structure systems, which offer benefits in terms of cost–performance relationships, the use of sustainable and natural materials, and environmental compatibility with respect to the mitigation and management of natural and anthropogenic risks.

Sustainability is implicit in many fields of the geotechnical discipline. The evolution of geotechnical design codes towards probabilistic and performance-based methods is de facto aimed at sustainability through cost–performance optimization. The design of geo-structures such as landfills is aimed at ensuring environmental and societal sustainability through the mitigation of anthropogenic risks. The adoption of geotechnical nature-based solutions provides an environmentally sustainable option with which to mitigate natural hazards related to slope instability and erosion. The rapid surge of energy geotechnics attests to the high potential of geotechnical engineering to contribute to a more efficient approach to developing energy sustainability.

Despite the conceptual harmonization between geotechnical engineering and sustainability, the geotechnical community could significantly benefit from guidelines, scientific research, and case study applications which facilitate the explicit inclusion of quantitative sustainability assessments and criteria in analysis and design. As other technical figures, engineers bear the honor and the responsibility of providing quantitative analyses, assessments, and predictions. Translating sustainability concepts into quantitative measures and communicating them via technical documentation promises to be challenging, but is fundamental to convincing decision makers and risk owners to invest in sustainable projects.

This Special Issue, entitled “Achieving and Communicating Sustainability Through Geotechnical Design”, aims to provide a set of best-practice contributions. This will focus on two principal areas. First among these is the explicit quantitative inclusion of sustainability concepts and criteria in new geotechnical designs; this will be paired, secondly, with an analysis of the use of quantitative sustainability parameters in existing designs. We invite you to contribute to this Issue by submitting comprehensive reviews, case studies, or research articles focusing on topics such as, but not limited to:

• the quantification of sustainability in reliability-based and performance-based geotechnical design
• the assessment of sustainability in the geotechnical design of nature-based solutions
• the quantification the sustainability of energy geotechnics
• the modelling of the sustainability of geotechnical projects through quantitative life cycle analysis
• the quantification the sustainability of geotechnical design in the light of climate change
• the quantification the sustainability in the geotechnical mitigation of natural and anthropogenic environmental risks
• sustainability-based reassessment of past geotechnical designs

Papers selected for this Special Issue will be subject to rigorous peer review with the aim of rapidly and widely disseminating research results, developments, and applications.

Prof. Dr. Marco Uzielli
Dr. Vittoria Capobianco
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• geotechnical engineering
• environmental sustainability
• natural hazards
• anthropogenic hazards
• climate change
• nature-based solutions
• life cycle analysis
• resilience