Energy Efficiency, Socio-Economic and Environmental Sustainability in Buildings and Civil Works

Dear Colleagues,

A built environment is a spatial, material, and cultural product of human activities conceived to combine physical elements and energy to support living, working, and playing. It plays multiple key roles in todays’ societies and can be considered as the result of many socioeconomic factors and processes that contribute to determine the way to proceed towards sustainable development.

Despite of this, the built environment is the biggest contributor to emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), accounting for up to 50% of the global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂): buildings with plants contribute some of the largest impacts. This is mainly because of construction activities consuming enormous quantities of raw materials: about 40% of the annual global material use takes place in the building construction sector. Additionally, the energy consumption associated with the life cycle of buildings accounts for around 40% of the global demand. This is reflected on an average basis in the European context, where the energy required for indoor heating represents the main share of the total energy consumed in buildings.

Therefore, there is a need to face today's environmental and socio-economic challenges. To this end, the building sector should be oriented towards solutions that are sustainable in a holistic, integrated approach, whilst enabling reducing consumption of both material and energy in the life cycle of a building.

Therefore, evaluations and considerations of both the energy, environmental, and socio-economic performance of a building and of its connected plants should regard its whole life cycle through the application of internationally recognized methods such as the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). This and other related methodologies are very powerful tools to address trade-offs, both between life cycle stages and between different sustainability pillars. In this context, this Special Issue arises with the aim of motivating prominent researchers to investigate the building sector and share their results. This will make it possible to create a reliable and up-to-date picture of the state-of-the-art on LCSA applications of buildings and civil works.

Prof. Dr. Antonio Messineo
Dr. Carlo Ingrao
Dr. Domenico Panno
Guest Editors

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