Abstract
Rapid urbanization in East Asian countries is bringing about the ever-increasing pressures on the environment. Improvement of urban infrastructures such as mass transportation and municipal sewage treatment and waste disposal systems is essential for the cities to achieve economic development while preserving the environment. Improvement of civil infrastructures have dual implications: it may mitigate the environmental pressures of human activities while it may cause additional environmental load through the use of energy and resources for the construction and maintenance of the facilities. This paper, therefore, presents a review on the current situation of the urban civil infrastructures in East Asian countries, i. e., China, Korea and Japan, and discusses their environmental implications and environmental assessment of alternative strategies of urban infrastructure improvement, using the life cycle environmental load as indices for evaluation.
