Sustainable Construction: Opportunities and Challenges for Green Building and Energy Efficient Building

Dear Colleagues,

Humankind (and the entire planet) are in increasingly greater danger due to climate change, its consequent global warming and its fatal destructive side effects. It must be strongly emphasised that among the important causes of climate change is the huge, worldwide, annual overconsumption of energy largely derived from the burning of fossil fuels (including coal, gas and oil), wood and biomass.

It is crucial to acknowledge that the integrated construction/building/civil sectors, through the construction process and the consequent thermal management of residential units and non residential buildings, consume the vast majority of the total amount of fossil energy annually used worldwide.

Thus, the integrated construction sector is the main user of fossil fuels and is the most inefficient and, consequently, the greatest polluter and the biggest cause of climate change and of its fatal consequences on the planet.

Reducing the absolute energy consumption in this sector is one of the most effective strategies in reducing the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. This reduction can be achieved by the implementation of a nature-based ecological transition that incorporates the bio ecological enhancement of building energy efficiency, which has already proved to be an excellent investment in the short to medium term, as shown by the initial available experiences and reports.

To ensure the planet’s survival, it is imperative that the use of fossil fuel energy in buildings must be dramatically reduced. The strategy used to achieve this shall be two-fold: the construction of exclusively –nature-based new green buildings and the ecological retrofitting of the existing world building stock/portfolio.

This strategy uses the world’s cheapest and most effective energy: the one we do not consume, i.e., building bio efficiency and its consequent structural and permanent energy-saving qualities. This cheapest energy is one key driver that can help find a definitive solution for worldwide climate change.

This proposed Special Issue aims to contribute to the understanding of the theories and the models involved, the tools and software used and the supporting case studies carried out regarding this topic, thereby promoting the completely nature-based transition of the entire construction sector to a more sustainable form of construction. This really is the decisive step needed to find a definitive solution to the effects of climate change, and it is a step that can be adopted for use in the smallest to the largest building on a local or global level.

This Special Issue aims to stimulate discussion and debate in some of (but not only) the following areas.

Areas

• Planet ecological transition.
• European Union ecological transition in the European framework: the Green Deal; the next-generation EU; the recovery and resilience facility; etc.
• Air pollution from the world construction sector: premature casualties.
• EPSPs, Energy Performance Simulation Program Software.
• ECM, Energy Conservation Measure.
• A nature-based ecological transition of the entire construction sector, with the main approaches of analysis, strategy, and valuation.
• Possible comparative scenarios in the life cycle framework: new green buildings versus new brown buildings.
• Real-life comparative scenarios in the life cycle framework: nature-based ecological retrofitting versus maintenance business as usual (BAS) of existing buildings.
• The simultaneous positive benefits stemming from nature-based ecological retrofitting and from new green buildings: from buildings to cities and the planet.
• The taxonomy of the contemporary positive benefits (co-benefits) stemming from nature-based ecological retrofitting and new green buildings.
• The approaches, methods, tools, and software used to appraise and valuate the ecological transition of the entire construction sector.
• Comparative tests of the overall profitability of the brand-new green building.
• Comparative tests of the overall profitability of the ecological retrofitting of already existing buildings.
• Post-carbon city strategies.
• Green building, energy district/quarter, post-carbon cities, ecological region and green country.
• New proposed research fields.

Prof. Dr. Domenico Enrico Massimo
Dr. Mariangela Musolino
Dr. Alessandro Malerba
Prof. Dr. Pierfrancesco De Paola
Guest Editors

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