Abstract—Construction industry is considered as one of the main contributor of natural resources depletion, responsible for high level pollution and it is one of the attributes that pose climate changes and other environmental threats. A lot of efforts had and have been done to reduce and control these impacts. Project Environmental Management (PEM) includes the processes required to ensure that the impacts of the project execution to the surrounding environment will remain within the limits stated in legal permits. The main aim of most of researches conducted managing Environmental Impacts (EI) is to protect earth planet from pollution. Those researches are presenting four major environmental elements; Environmental Management Systems (EMS), Environmental Design (ED), Environmental Planning (EP) and Environmental Impacts Assessments (EIA). Although everything has been said about environmental management for construction projects, but almost everything remains to be said and therefore to be explored or rediscovered because incontestably, almost everything remains to be done. This paper aimed at reviewing some of what has been said about PEM. Also one of its objectives is to explore and rediscover the whole view of managing the EI problems by proposing a framework that based on the relation between these environmental researches. Keywords—Environmental planning, sustainable design, EIA and EMS. I. INTRODUCTION ONSTRUCTION as any other industry is an "organized economic activity concerned with manufacture, extraction and processing of raw materials, or construction" [1]. This definition addresses two terminologies; activities (processes) and output (products). Performance of any industry is evaluated based on specific set of criteria; cost, time, quality and environmental performance. These criteria evaluate the products based on their attributes and processes based on the objectives they can achieve. Environmental performance as a criteria follow the same way to evaluate and control the environmental performance of construction industry. This explains one of differences between the previous four environmental research categories; sustainability is focusing on design attributes while EMS and environmental planning maintain construction processes and Sami Mustafa M. E. Ahmed and Noor Amila Wan Abdullah Zawawi are with the Civil Engineering Department – Universiti Teknologi Petronas – Malaysia (e-mail: sami.utp@hotmail.com). Zulkipli B. Ghazali is with the Management & Humanities Department– Universiti Teknologi Petronas - Malaysia. practices. Construction projects will be ready for execution when its client signs contracts with many parties; like designers, contractors, governments and so on. Design team and construction system can be considered as the ones of high importance from technical point of view. This paper reviews some literature about how contract conditions, construction systems and design teams are managed to attain environmental requirement of the client. Also it proposes a framework to coordinate these managerial efforts done by DT and CS. II. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS ASSESSMENT Building life cycle (BLC) is very important for studying its environmental impacts. BLC in general include five stages as represented in Fig. 1 [2]. Fig. 1 BLC flow chart There is a conflict in the information about the significance of environmental impact at each stage [3]. Thus most studies are trying to cover all of them in one model; for example the green building concept defined as "an environmentally sustainable building, which was designed, constructed and operated to minimize environmental impacts."[4]. Recent studies indicated that construction was ranked as third industry in USA based on generating Green House Emission GHG. Hence the environmental impacts of construction processes must be of great consideration [3]. Fig. 2 classified some of the methods used for assessing the environmental impacts EIA of construction processes. A Critical Review on the Development of a Theoretical Framework for Managing Environmental Impacts of Construction Project Sami Mustafa M. E. Ahmed, Noor Amila Wan Abdullah Zawawi, Zulkipli B. Ghazali C Demolition Natural resources extraction Building material production Operation On-site construction World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Environmental and Ecological Engineering Vol:7, No:8, 2013 575 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 7(8) 2013 ISNI:0000000091950263 Open Science Index, Environmental and Ecological Engineering Vol:7, No:8, 2013 publications.waset.org/17123/pdf