Green Materials, Smart BIM and Comfortable Environments: Towards Sustainable Building

Dear Colleagues,

The Earth is in danger due to global warming and its fatal destructive side effects.

Climate change is the direct consequence of our huge, worldwide, annual consumption of energy, which is largely derived from the burning of fossil fuels (including coal, gas, and oil), wood, and biomass.

The integrated construction/building/civil sectors, throughout the construction process and the consequent thermal management of residential units and non-residential buildings, consume the vast majority of the fossil energy used worldwide each year. Therefore, the “integrated” civil sector, including these settlements, is the world’s largest fossil energy consumer and polluter, and thus the biggest cause of climate change.

Reducing fossil energy consumption in this sector is an exceptional opportunity and one of the most important strategies for reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). This reduction can be obtained by carrying out a nature-based ecological transition that includes the bio-ecological improvement of buildings’ energy efficiency, which has already proved to be an excellent investment in the short-to-medium term, as shown by initial available experiences and reports.

The strategy used to achieve this shall be two-fold:

• the construction of exclusively nature-based new green buildings;
• the ecological retrofitting of the existing world building stock.

This strategy uses the world’s cheapest and most effective energy: the not-consumed one, i.e., the energy efficiency of buildings and its consequent permanent energy-saving qualities.

This Special Issue aims to contribute to our understanding of the theories and the models involved in this endeavour, the software and the tools used, and the supporting case studies carried out regarding this topic, thereby promoting the completely nature-based ecological transition of the integrated civil sector to a more sustainable form of construction. This is the decisive step needed to find a definitive solution to the dramatic effects and impacts of climate change.

Dr. Domenico Enrico Massimo
Guest Editor

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• pollution
• climate change
• global warming
• sustainability
• ecological transition
• urban metabolism and post-carbon city strategies
• pollution from construction sector
• nature-based ecological transition of global construction sector
• implementation of nature-based transitions
• sustainable construction
• green building
• brand new green buildings versus new brown buildings
• green building rating tool (GBRT) and GBRT post-occupancy valuations
• ecological retrofitting of existing portfolio versus BAS maintenance of stocks
• energy bio–eco (nature-based)-efficiency
• energy conservation
• nature-based energy conservation measures
• co-benefits of energy conservation measures
• co-benefit valuations
• MCA, multi-criteria analysis
• MCDV, multi-criteria decision valuation
• energy performance simulation program software, EPSPs
• thermal comfort
• life cycle assessment (LCA)
• LCA of green buildings versus brown buildings
• benefit–cost valuations and CFA (cash flow analysis) of investments
• data base management system (DBMS), GIS, BIM, and 3D studio in the strategy and implementation of green buildings
• cost analysis
• cost archives
• cost estimation
• cost forecast
• detailed cost estimate of nature-based new constructions and retrofitting of green buildings
• cost, income, and market value of buildings
• market price less the total construction cost of a building: value added and profitability creation
• market price premium for the extra expenses of green buildings
• spatial and factor analyses of materials, works, and yard sites in green construction
• material and factor analyses of green buildings versus brown buildings