Green Building Rating Systems (GBRSs) are typically third-party, voluntary, and market driven standards that measure buildings’ sustainability level by multi-criteria assessment, and encourage the adoption of environmentally, socially and economically sustainable practices in design, construction and operation of buildings (or neighborhoods). GBRSs aim at guiding and assessing the project throughout all its life cycle, thus limiting the negative impact on the environment, as well as on the building occupants’ health and well-being, and even reducing operational costs. Hundreds of GBRSs are now available worldwide, varying in approaches, application processes, and evaluation metrics. BREEAM, CASBEE, Green Star and LEED are among the most applied worldwide. Despite some differences, they all adhere to the same general evaluation structure: project performances ares measured using a set of relevant indicators, grouped per topics such as water management, energy use, materials, site qualities. Each assessed requirement is assigned a score/judgment, the total of which determines the level of sustainability achieved. In addition to regular updates, a current trend is to improve the effectiveness of protocols, making them more comprehensive and accurate, while keeping them easy to use.

Since energy transition depends significantly on reducing the built environment’s energy needs, many regulations and incentives have been implemented globally over the last three decades. Despite some positive results, many scholars suggest that households’ behavioral change could greatly accelerate progress. People’s levels of awareness and willingness to change, as well as the provision of feedback technologies, are important factors affecting the process. In spite of the extent of this body of literature, household consumption keeps rising. Our thesis is that the subject has been investigated without considering some important correlations among factors. Therefore, this study developed a survey to investigate actual consumers’ perspectives on the topic by combining people’s awareness of energy use, interaction with metering devices, and user motivation into a coherent framework. A testing session involving 500 people was held as a validation phase for a future large-scale launch of the questionnaire. The test yielded some early outcomes on how people become more interested in changing as they gain more knowledge and are offered suggestions. However, despite their supposedly advanced knowledge as educators and students, the sample’s level of awareness was low, suggesting that a more user-centered approach is needed for wide-scale progress.

Industrial facilities are responsible for several detrimental effects on the landscape. Impact occurs in terms of both interference in the main ecosystem's physical matrices and intense perceptual-aesthetic contrasts with the landscape. As a result, the social sphere also is affected and corporate identity is threatened. Agri-food companies are particularly touched by the issue due to the high environmental impact of their processes, their recurring proximity to the rural landscape, and the strong link between corporate image and environmental attitude. Since the Eighties, literature and regulations have proved harmonisation between industry and landscape is a crucial element of companies' social awareness. In this framework, some tools have been developed to analyse the impacts, but their main focus is on environmental issues. Nowadays there is no unitary vision capable of balancing manufacturing requirements with effective measures to mitigate the impact of factories on the landscape at all different levels. Our research therefore aims to define a methodology to analyse how agri-food facilities interfere with the landscape and to develop a set of measures suitable to promote less conflictual relationships. This can be achieved by combining the natural, perceptual-aesthetic and social/cultural dimensions of landscape. The goal is to develop a design support tool to analyse impacts and prioritise weaknesses, thereby helping companies to define case-specific mitigation strategies. In particular, the paper presents real life case studies noteworthy for the adoption of mitigation practices, from which a set of general tactics was devised. Over 50 exemplary facilities have been analysed, 200 good practices identified, and more than 100 general mitigation tactics formulated. Furthermore, the study has identified recurrent patterns in the architecture of factories, which generally confirm trends found in literature.

Many actions have been undertaken worldwide to cope with climate change and to effectively reach the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Top-down approaches, based on both policies for the development of enabling technologies and incentives to promote their wide applications, have been largely adopted in most of the cases. However, the potential contribution of changes in individual behaviours still represents an underestimated field of improvement, despite many scholars have already evidenced their considerable expected impacts. This paper presents the first outcomes of a study on the role of citizens’ behavioural change in reducing GHG emissions, focussing on the functions and performed activities at household level. Starting from a review of the emerging body of literature on the topic, a map is drafted linking the people’s actions and choices and their most relevant effects on each of the environmental categories they can interact with. The mapping provides a list of suitable practices and lifestyles shifts to be adopted, organized by categories and weighted by their emission potential reduction on the whole households’ carbon footprint. This results in a sort of easy-to-read console allowing citizens to operate according to more informed decisions within their homes, thus accelerating the sustainable transition by bottom-up initiatives.

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Housing plays a key role in the world path to energy transition, and retrofitting buildings is a major asset to this end. Unfortunately, despite the supporting measures and incentives promoted in many countries, the renovation rate is still too slow. This is even more complex within some specific assets, such as social housing, which, especially in Italy, depends on the availability of public funds. The study proposes a predictive tool conceived as an enabler in the decision-making process, capable of considering and comparing the performance levels that different retrofitting actions can reach, according to building features, intervention costs, timing, and resource availability. The tool is tested on a social housing case study in Bologna.

A low level of energy literacy can hamper the adoption of climate-responsive solutions in the built environment. This is often the case of social housing neighborhoods, where the implementation of improvement measures such as those from the EU Recovery Plan (PNRR in Italy) may become difficult because of the specific socio-cultural and economic criticalities. Here, inhabitants are more prone to misinformation as well as energy poverty. Therefore, understanding the level of knowledge and willingness to implement certain design actions at both site and building levels is of utmost importance to make the transition as effective and just as needed. The article presents a pilot survey conducted in two Italian social housing neighborhoods to assess residents’ understanding and preparedness to implement climate-responsive strategies, as well as literacy gaps about energy transition and related public fundings. This can prepare the ground for developing effective solutions to improve the livability of the built environment based on local needs and features that can be combined synergistically with financial incentives. The survey results are discussed, in addition to the upscaling potential.

For years, the building sector has been marked by the progressive exploitation of raw materials and the growing production of waste. The product and process innovations, based on waste valorisation starting from their geographical location and identification, prefigure potential reductions of environmental impacts. This paper presents the methodology and findings of the mapping of waste from construction and manufacturing processes, carried out in Sardinia to identify possible scenarios of valorisation. The geographical location of waste production both in construction and manufacturing processes, along with their possible reuse, have allowed the definition of some supply chains which are able to process their own waste, according to industrial symbiosis scenarios.