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Approximately 30–40% of the total natural resources that are used in industrialized countries are exploited by the building sector, and almost 40% of the world’s consumption of materials converts into the built environment. Thus, improving the environmental performance of building sector could be crucial for reaching the sustainability of urban environment. The main scope of this paper is to highlight the interest of building renovation as an adequate measure for improving building environmental performance in term of emergy and identify processes that cause significant environmental stress on a local ecosystem. To enable the comparison of all phases and processes for the studied system, an emergy evaluation was performed. A multi-apartment building located in the city of Šabac, Serbia, was used as case study. Several building renovation scenarios were considered, which include different measures for building envelope thermal performance improvements, as well as installation of local renewable energy heat production system. Different renovation timelines were also compared. The overall results showed that 68% of the emergy flow is caused during the building operation phase, 24% during the construction phase and only 8% during the end-of-life phase. All renovation measures proved to be beneficial from the environmental point of view, and the use of additional materials and resources to conduct renovation measures considered did not have a negative impact on the building overall environmental performance. The effect of conducting renovation measures after the first decade of building lifetime improved the overall building environmental performance by almost 50% when compared to the same renovation measures conducted in the last decade of the lifetime (for all measures considered). Finally, based on the emergy indices analysis, it can be concluded that the application of building renovation measures improves the overall building environmental performance, enables higher efficiency in indigenous resource use, and lowers the pressure on a local ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment of the seismic damage and usability of the building stock started a few days after the L'Aquila earthquake in order to evaluate the safety conditions of the buildings concerned. Several ordinances of the Prime Minister were issued to regulate the reconstruction process. In particular, based also on damage level, the procedures for repair, strengthening or demolition/reconstruction of residential buildings were established with the definition of relevant state funding. For each damaged building, practitioners engaged by property owners designed repair and strengthening interventions and then computed the corresponding costs. These projects were the technical basis for funding applications that owners submitted to the government. Technical and financial information collected during the approval procedure of such applications allowed compilation of a database regarding 5775 residential buildings damaged by the L'Aquila earthquake. The present study examines the restoration policy and the procedures regulating the reconstruction process of residential property outside city centres. In particular, the data related to the first phase of the reconstruction process (the so-called 'light damage' reconstruction) to recover the usability of slightly damaged buildings are illustrated. The discussion focuses on the time-to-approval of funding applications and on the public contributions granted for repair and local strengthening works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The buildings sector accounts for nearly 41% of the United States' primary energy usage. Various lifecycle analysis (LCA)-based tools are available for facilitating sustainable material selection and energy usage estimation, especially during the material production and construction phases of a building. However, for the use and maintenance phase, there is a lack of a comprehensive framework that can monitor and quantify the effects of various factors such as building system and material deterioration and dynamic occupant behavior patterns on the energy consumption. This research propose a lifecycle energy monitoring framework that couples LCA and energy simulation analysis using a system dynamics modeling framework to enable a distributed simulation platform that can monitor and control the energy requirements during all phases of a building's lifecycle. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework can help understand the optimal maintenance and replacement period of major building materials, thereby providing options for limiting the overall energy usage and environmental impacts from a building during its entire lifecycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to an article on the reconstruction effort following the April and May 2015 earthquakes in Nepal which appeared on the publication's website.