Today, buildings still account for almost half of the global energy consumption and carbon emission. This highlights the necessity to increase energy efficiency requirements worldwide in a common effort to reduce the construction sector's impacts on the environment. The current energy policies are driving toward a design that relies on airtight and highly insulated envelopes. As a consequence, energy efficient houses are found to have insufficient indoor air change rates, impacting on the indoor air quality and resulting in higher latent loads.

Academicians and professionals in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) field have expressed an increasing interest in sustainability and its application in the development of construction projects, especially with its deemed relationship with lean construction, for the purpose of improving efficiency in the construction processes. Practices framed under the lean philosophy show their potential in reducing environmental, economic, and social impacts during the construction phase, with an increase in the parameters of sustainability in the development of projects.

Green building is an important measure to deal with energy and environment problems in the construction sector of the world. In this study, knowledge mapping analysis is used, and 3,060 articles are selected for further study (1900–2019). Based on CiteSpace (5.3.R4 SE 64-bit), the knowledge base, hot topics and research trends of green-building-related research are presented. The key highlights of the overall analysis results are: (1) Research on green buildings has received more extensive attention in the 21st century.

Background: The transformation of the global energy sector from fossil-based fuels to low/non-carbon fuels will reduce environmental pollutant load, which in turn will benefit human health. However, with upscaling of emerging renewable technologies and energy sources, it is important to identify the potential for unintended health impacts, and to understand where the knowledge gaps lie with respect to health. We aimed to identify these gaps by conducting a scoping review. Methods: We conducted a systematic search of Medline, Web of Science, PubMed and EMBASE.

This study presents a summary of green building research through a bibliometric approach. A total of 2980 articles published in 2000–2016 were reviewed and analyzed. The results indicated that green building research had been concentrated on the subject categories of engineering, environmental sciences & ecology, and construction & building technology, and the keywords ‘building envelope’ and ‘living wall’ obtained citation bursts in the recent years.