Environmental Assessment of Buildings for Deep Impact Reductions

Dear colleagues,

Buildings stand for a significant part of direct and indirect environmental impacts of all countries. Any major improvement we make in designing, constructing, operating, and finally managing the end life of these long-lived structures is critical in the journey to achieving national and global impact reduction goals and aspirations.

As a functioning building depends on an ensemble of different materials, components, elements, and systems, environmental assessment of buildings requires bringing diverse insights together to enable more comprehensive and inclusive evaluation of all relevant aspects. If we are to make meaningful cuts in buildings-related impacts, we need to see beyond a ‘less is better’ lens. This necessitates taking stock of the experiences of the past decades; identifying the challenges for the next decades; and providing directions on how knowledge creation based on impact assessment will go hand in hand with changing practices. What new insights can be added to the current approach of assessing environmental impacts of buildings? How much reduction in impact from buildings is good enough in light of tackling national and global environmental challenges? What is the best way to present assessment results and communicate them to different practitioners, such as architects and engineers, and other stakeholders, such as owners and regulators? What are the experiences of using environmental assessment of buildings in changing regulatory and industry directions? What assessment approaches will deliver clearer messages and actionable items to practitioners without complicating their practice too much? How can environmental assessment be used with economic and social assessment at the building scale in defining a sphere of conditions that will realize deep impact reductions through economical viable and socially desirable changes?

Manuscripts dealing with the aforementioned questions and focusing on but not limited to the following are welcome.

• Tools and systems;
• Methodological aspects;
• Data access and quality issues;
• Data visualization;
• Performance benchmarking;
• Design and management practices.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Getachew Assefa
Guest Editor

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