A Survey of Environmental Performance Enhancement Strategies and Building Data Capturing Techniques in the Nigerian Context

Abstract

The need to improve the performance of Nigeria’s office buildings is due to, energy challenges, increasing population, changing user needs, and climate change. With the expansion of several Nigerian cities, existing buildings constitute a significant portion of the building stock, and improving their environmental performance could be more cost-effective than reconstruction. The use of simulation packages to assess alternative retrofitting enhancement scenarios is a straightforward approach. However, in Nigeria it is often challenging to get appropriate information to facilitate this type of evaluation; many buildings were not built to their original specifications, and when available, the records are often in a poor state due to deterioration. Studies that aimed at enhancing a building’s performance hardly stated the acquisition of the required building information. This paper investigates current practices and future possibilities of improvement measures and data capturing of existing buildings using a questionnaire survey of 133 building professionals in Benin City. The inter-relationship between energy efficiency, the environment, and building design with a high potential for meaningful retrofit to mitigate energy inefficiencies is known but not fully utilized. The collected thought on current practices signifies the need for developing a more economical and reliable methodology for data capturing and evaluation.

Factors Influencing the Use of Low Carbon Emissivity Features and Strategies in Office Buildings

“…According to (Mustaffa, Isa, Ekundayo and Joseph 2022), a societies awareness levels of issues surrounding global warming and climate change infers that the society is on the path of transitioning to minimizing the environmental impacts of construction projects on the built environment. Energy challenges which has arisen due to huge surges in urban population figures has further exacerbated changes in user needs which are having devastating consequences on the environmental sustainability of the environment thereby further contributing to the effects of buildings on climate change (Omoragbon, Al-Maiyah and Coates 2023). It was further observed that energy consumption in buildings depends on two major conditions which affect building energy use according to (Akram, Hasannuzaman, Cuce and Cuce 2023).These authors further believe that these multiple conditions are categorized further namely factors directly linked to the environment and factors relating to design parameters.…”