Short answers, pulled from the story.
Global expenditure on construction exceeded $11 trillion a year in 2022, equivalent to about 13 percent of global GDP. That figure was forecast to rise to around $14.8 trillion in 2030. In 2012, global expenditure on construction was about $4 trillion.
Construction incurs more occupational fatalities than any other sector in both the United States and the European Union. In the US in 2019, about 20 percent of private industry worker deaths, some 1,061 people, occurred in construction. In 2017, falls caused more than a third of US construction deaths, 366 out of 971.
Construction divides broadly into buildings, infrastructure, and industrial. Building construction splits into residential and non-residential, infrastructure covers heavy civil works such as dams, bridges, highways, and railways, and industrial construction includes offshore energy installations, mining, refineries, and manufacturing plants.
Construction stems from the Latin constructio, formed from com- meaning together and struere meaning to pile up, and from Old French construction. As a noun it describes how something is built or the nature of its structure, while to construct is the verb for the act of building.
The three main procurement methods are design-bid-build, design-build, and construction management. Design-bid-build is the most common and well-established, design-build became more common from the late 20th century and gives a single entity both design and construction, and construction management lets the client hold separate contracts with the designer, a construction manager, and individual trade contractors.
According to McKinsey in 2019, the vast majority of large construction projects go over budget and take 20 percent longer than expected. Causes include underbids, cash flow problems, and change orders on government projects that face no competition after the initial bid. Fraud is also a growing concern in construction.
The World Green Building Council has stated that buildings and infrastructure can reach 40 percent less embodied carbon, but only through urgent transformation. In 2021, the National Engineering Policy Centre published Decarbonising Construction: Building a new net zero industry, setting out around 20 recommendations and six overarching system levers tied to the Paris Agreement target of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C.