A comprehensive model for quantifying the environmental and financial performance of cities (original) (raw)
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The objective of the research project LEKOECOS is to quantify the environmental and economic resources consumed by a building during planning, construction and in the utilisation and operation stage. The complexity of the utilisation process over the long life span requires a calculation model with well-orchestrated normative definitions and idealisations. The presented environmental-economical model is based on the life cycle costs model LEKOS, developed by the Danube University Krems, and the environmental assessment software ECOSOFT by IBO. A new consistent model architecture was built up in order to synchronise the different characters of the environmental and economic resources of the building along its life cycle. This new architecture enabled a holistic consideration of the consumption of the environmental resources from elements as well as from services over the whole life span.Purpose of the system integration is a combined economic and ecological life cycle model for build...
Application of life cycle thinking towards sustainable cities: A review
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2017
Defining sustainable cities is not straightforward. The main issues involved in urban sustainability are buildings, energy, food, green areas and landscape, mobility, urban planning, water and waste; and their improvement is promoted through different strategies. However, a quantitative method, such as life cycle thinking (LCT), is essential to evaluating these strategies. This paper reviews LCT studies related to urban issues to identify the main research gaps in the evaluation of these improvement strategies. The review identifies the main sustainability strategies associated with each urban issue and compiles articles that deal with these strategies through LCT, including environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC), social LCA (S-LCA) and life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), as well as integrated analyses with combined tools. Water, waste and buildings are the urban issues that accounted for a larger amount of studies. In contrast, a limited number of papers assessed urban planning and energy (excluding energy in buildings). Strong interrelations among urban issues were identified, most of them including water. In terms of methods, 79% of the studies exclusively applied life cycle tools (i.e., LCA, LCC, S-LCA or LCSA). Within this group, the environmental dimension was the focus of 84% of the papers. Single environmental indicators (e.g., global warming) were common in 20% of the analyses, highlighting the need to integrate more impact categories to prevent trade-offs. In the field of social and sustainability assessment, there is a need for methodological advances that foster their application in urban areas. Further research should cover the thematic and methodological gaps identified in this paper, such as developing models that assess complex urban issues, generating comprehensive LCT studies and promoting multi-indicators. Life cycle tools might benefit from revising the methodology with stakeholders to optimize the understanding and communication of life cycle results for policy-and decision-making processes.
Life Cycle Analysis Challenges through Building Rating Schemes within the European Framework
Sustainability
The decarbonisation of buildings is a crucial milestone if European cities mean to reach their mitigation targets. The construction sector was responsible for 38% of the GHG emissions in 2020. From these emissions, 11% is calculated to be currently embodied in building materials. In this context, an evaluation from a life cycle perspective is becoming increasingly necessary to achieve the objectives set. Currently, there are different building rating systems (BRS) at European level that allow the evaluation of the degree of sustainability of buildings. During this study, the authors have evaluated to what extent and how the most extended five BRS (NF Habitat HQE, VERDE, DGNB, BREEAM, and HPI systems) in the European framework have integrated the life cycle methodology during their evaluation process. Four methodologies have been used in the research in order to analyse these five systems: quantitative assessment, multi-level perspective, mapping–gap analysis, and expert interviews. ...
The regenerative approach to model an integrated urban-building evaluation method
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In this paper we focus on crucial issues concerning the effectiveness of evaluation of sustainability in the built environment. The paper argues that we need to rethink the evaluation of urban-building sustainability from an integrative perspective. It advances a theoretical and methodological model based on the regenerative approach, which opens up a new way to deal with the sustainability of the built environment. An enlarged definition of urban metabolism is used to carry out the integrated evaluation. Central in it is the concept of reliability, which expresses the ability of products and processes in the built environment to be adaptive, resilient and regenerative. We use reliability in a transversal manner through the process of making the built environment sustainable, referring it both to buildings and the regenerative process triggered by sustainable actions addressed to buildings. Holistic indicators allow assessing it quantitatively or qualitatively. Through reliability we bring regenerative thinking from a theoretical to an operational level. When referred to buildings, reliability allows considering sustainable performances not usually assessed in current evaluations. When referred to processes, it helps to understand directions of change in relation to sustainability of the built environment. Our method can be easily associated to current evaluation systems exceeding their boundaries.
An operational methodology for applying dynamic Life Cycle Assessment to buildings
Building and Environment, 2018
While the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method is a powerful tool for environmental performance evaluation, the current LCA methodology faces some limitations in evaluating environmental performances of systems with a long time scales, such as buildings. Building systems have particularly long lifetimes as compared to other products or services. They are composed of elements that evolve over time and are characterized by time-dependent parameters. A literature review was performed in the aim of identifying the time-dependent characteristics of a building system at different levels: building technology level (e.g. technical performance degradations and technological innovations), end-user level (e.g. occupant behaviour) and external system level (e.g. infrastructures, energy mix, regulations). A new LCA framework including the time dimension, applied to a building system, is proposed. It involves operational and reproducible tools (computational software and databases) to perform effective temporal evaluations and incorporates dynamic Life Cycle Inventory (LCI, including the temporal evolution of a building system and of the related environment interventions, i.e. emissions and resource consumption) and dynamic Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA, climate change and toxicity). To integrate the specificities of buildings in dynamic LCI modelling, different existing assets (at national and international level) in the field of LCA are analysed. This work proposes an original methodology for performing a dynamic LCA of buildings using new tools still under development.
For the economic and environmental optimization of new construction projects as well as renovations, it is essential to estimate the resource consumption, e.g. of different design alternatives, at a very early stage of planning. This paper presents an integrative environmental-economical model built on the life cycle costs model LEKOS [1], developed by Danube University Krems, and the environmental assessment software ECOSOFT by IBO. Purpose of the system integration is a combined economic and ecological life cycle model for buildings, realised in an easy-to-use tool for the evaluation of life span resource consumptions at different stages of the service life of the building.
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
Reducing the energy consumption of buildings is a priority for carbon emissions mitigation in urban areas. Building stock energy models have been developed to support decisions of public authorities in renovation strategies. However, the burdens of renovation interventions and their temporal distribution are mostly overlooked, leading to potential overestimation of environmental benefits. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides a holistic estimation of environmental impacts, but further developments are needed to correctly consider spatio-temporal aspects. We propose a spatio-temporal LCA framework to assess renovation scenarios of urban housing stocks, integrating: 1) a geospatial building-by-building stock model, 2) energy demand modelling, 3) product-based LCA, and 4) a scenario generator. Temporal aspects are considered both in the lifecycle inventory and the lifecycle impact assessment phases, by accounting for the evolution of the existing housing stock and applying time-adjusted carbon footprint calculation. We apply the framework for the carbon footprint assessment of housing renovation in Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg). Results show that the renovation stage represents 4% to 16% of the carbon footprint in the residual service life of existing buildings, respectively after conventional or advanced renovations. Under current renovation rates, the carbon footprint reduction would be limited to 3-4% by 2030. Pushing renovation rates to 3%, enables carbon reductions up to 28% by 2030 when combined with advanced renovations. Carbon reductions in the operational stage of buildings are offset by 8-9% due to the impacts of renovation. Using time-adjusted emissions, results in higher weight for the renovation stage and slightly lower benefits for renovation.
Sustainability in the Built Environment: Integrating Scales of Action and Evaluation
Urban sustainability is still far from being reached. This situation testifies the difficulties to plan, design, implement and manage sustainable development processes in an integrative perspective. There are several cognitive, political and technological challenges to be faced in order to change this situation and make sustainabilisation process of the city more effective. In this paper we focus on issues concerning our ability to learn to integrate social, economic and environmental aspects through evaluation of sustainability in the city. To oppose the inconsistency of action shown by the weak results we have obtained from our investments in sustainable development during last decades, this paper argues that we need to think about sustainability of the built environment and its evaluation taking into account spatial issues, usually underestimated or assimilated to a problem of scale in the current evaluation frameworks. Following the results obtained in relation to the construction of an integrated urban-building evaluation framework, the paper underlines that if approached as spatially sensitive, evaluation of sustainability carried out at any scale would be aimed at stimulating the regenerative capacity of places.
IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 2019
The literature shows a lack of environmental indicators able to support the transition from a sustainable to a smart city framework, since the priority area “built environment” is indeed more comprehensively addressed by urban sustainability assessment systems (13%), than by smart city frameworks (4%) [12]. As “smaller cities inside a larger agglomerate” [19], urban districts play a key role in defining effective and innovative paths toward a smarter city, but defining a sustainable urban district is not straightforward, and even less is capturing the induced impacts due to interactions between individual buildings and their surround urban setting [23]. The adoption of a quantitative method for evaluation, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), emerges as an essential step for this purpose [24]. This article explores the application of a streamlined LCA on the urban district main issues (buildings, energy, water and waste), referring to an urban retrofitting intervention of Bolognina ...