Top-down or bottom-up? – How environmental benchmarks can support the design process

Hollberg, Alexander; Lützkendorf, Thomas; Habert, Guillaume

doi:10.1016/j.buildenv.2019.02.026

Cited by 96 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…It was first introduced by ETH Zürich in 1998 and envisioned the average First World citizen reducing the overall primary annual energy consumption to 2000 W (which is 48 kWh/day) and 1 tonne CO 2 per capita and per year by 2150 with intermediate target of 2 t CO 2 in 2050. This vision was then adapted considering the urgency of climate action in order to achieve the budget of 1 t CO 2 e per capita and year already in 2050 (Hollberg, Lützkendorf, & Habert 2019). However, the 1 t per capita value does not come from a global budget but the assumption that this level is a sustainable emission level, considering current population level and applying a contraction and convergence logic.…”

Section: Per Capita Budget For Single Buildingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon budgets for buildings: harmonising temporal, spatial and sectoral dimensions

Habert¹,

Röck²,

Steininger³

et al. 2020

Buildings and Cities

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Target values for creating carbon budgets for buildings are important for developing climateneutral building stocks. A lack of clarity currently exists for defining carbon budgets for buildings and what constitutes a unit of assessment-particularly the distinction between production-and consumption-based accounting. These different perspectives on the system and the function that is assessed hinder a clear and commonly agreed definition of 'carbon budgets' for building construction and operation. This paper explores the processes for establishing a carbon budget for residential and non-residential buildings. A detailed review of current approaches to budget allocation is presented. The temporal and spatial scales of evaluation are considered as well as the distribution rules for sharing the budget between parties or activities. This analysis highlights the crucial need to define the temporal scale, the roles of buildings as physical artefacts and their economic activities. A framework is proposed to accommodate these different perspectives and spatio-temporal scales towards harmonised and comparable cross-sectoral budget definitions. Policy relevance The potential to develop, implement and monitor greenhouse gas-related policies and strategies for buildings will depend on the provision of clear targets. Based on global limits, a carbon budget can establish system boundaries and scalable targets. An operational framework is presented that clarifies greenhouse gas targets for buildings in the different parts of the world that is adaptable to the context and circumstances of a particular place. A carbon budget can enable national regulators to set feasible and legally binding requirements. This will assist the many different stakeholders responsible for decisions on buildings to coordinate and incorporate their specific responsibility at one specific level or scale of activity to ensure overall compliance. Therefore, determining a task specific carbon budget requires an appropriate management of the global carbon budget to ensure that specific budgets overlap, but that the sum of them is equal to the available global budget without double-counting.

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Section: Per Capita Budget For Single Buildingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon budgets for buildings: harmonising temporal, spatial and sectoral dimensions

Habert¹,

Röck²,

Steininger³

et al. 2020

Buildings and Cities

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This allocation is performed by assigning a share of the safe operating space (SoSOS) (Ryberg et al , 2018b) to the segment k for each boundary i . There are many different possibilities to define the SoSOS (EEA & FOEN, 2020) (e.g., economic value of a resource – Ryberg et al , 2018a, 2018b; grandfathering approach – Hollberg et al , 2019; or future emission scenarios – Pineda et al , 2015). In general, any allocation principle can be applied in the ERA method.…”

Section: The Era Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological resource availability: a method to estimate resource budgets for a sustainable economy

2020

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Non-technical summary Resources are the basis of our economy and their provision causes major shares of the global environmental burdens, many of which are beyond safe limits today. In order to be sustainable, our economy needs to be able to operate within those boundaries. As resources are the physical ‘currency’ of our economy, we present a method that allows translating Earth system boundaries into resource budgets. This ecological resource availability determines the global annual production of a resource that can be considered absolutely sustainable. The budgets can be managed like financial budgets, bringing absolute environmental limits one step closer to decision-makers.

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“…Malmqvist et al (2011) developed in consultation with stakeholders (e.g., clients and architect) a guide for the use of LCA in the building sector [37] recommending that designers start with a simplified version of LCA and then move on to more complex versions. The final aspect to facilitate the use and suitability of LCA in building design is the use of benchmarks and target values to help designers interpret the results by giving them something to which to relate their design solutions [39,58,59]. Environmental impacts induced by buildings can differ greatly depending on the region.…”

Section: Life-cycle Assessment In the Building Design Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Lack of Knowledge and Tools Hinders the Eco-Design of Buildings—A Systematic Review

et al. 2021

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The building sector is responsible for extensive resource consumption and waste generation, resulting in high pressure on the environment. A way to potentially mitigate this is by including environmental considerations during building design through the concept known as eco-design. Despite the multiple available approaches of eco-design, the latter is not easily achieved in the building sector. The objective of this paper is to identify and discuss what barriers are currently hindering the implementation of eco-design in the building sector and by which measures building designers can include environmental considerations in their design process. Through a systematic literature review, several barriers to implementation were identified, the main ones being lack of suitable legislation, lack of knowledge amongst building designers, and lack of suitable tools for designers to use. Furthermore, two specific tools were identified that allow the inclusion of environmental consideration in building design, along with nine design strategies providing qualitative guidance on how to potentially minimize energy and material consumption, as well as waste generation. This paper contributes a holistic overview of the major barriers to and existing tools and method for the eco-design of buildings, and provides guidance for both future research and practice.

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Top-down or bottom-up? – How environmental benchmarks can support the design process

Cited by 96 publications

References 20 publications

Carbon budgets for buildings: harmonising temporal, spatial and sectoral dimensions

Carbon budgets for buildings: harmonising temporal, spatial and sectoral dimensions

Ecological resource availability: a method to estimate resource budgets for a sustainable economy

How Lack of Knowledge and Tools Hinders the Eco-Design of Buildings—A Systematic Review

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