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Energy poverty is a significant social, economic, and health issue which increasingly affects millions of households worldwide. Both climate change and the socio-economic crisis have aggravated this phenomenon, making families unable to keep adequate comfort conditions at home because of economic constraints and/or dwelling inefficiencies. Considering the recent inflation trends, as well as the global effort to reduce the building sector's carbon emissions, energy retrofitting of buildings emerges as the most forward-looking strategy to cope with energy poverty risk. In the case of large building stocks, which are typical for social housing complexes across the EU, deep and fast energy retrofitting might prove challenging, especially considering the resource shortages and disruptions to occupants that may arise. Therefore, this article investigates the relationship between the envelope's insulation ratio and the risk of energy poverty for households. To this end, diverse scenarios are defined, corresponding to progressive increases in the percentage of building envelope that is insulated. The resulting energy needs are calculated for each of them and correlated with local average incomes and relative energy expenses of households. This is tested on an Italian social housing demo case. The results confirm a predictable but not linear correlation between thermal insulation and reduced energy needs for heating, and an interesting side effect on cooling needs for scenarios that perform better in winter. As for income, energy cost has a greater effect on the energy poverty risk when monthly rent is lower, while energy prices have a major role when rent per month is higher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing plays a key role in the world path to energy transition, and retrofitting buildings is a major asset to this end. Unfortunately, despite the supporting measures and incentives promoted in many countries, the renovation rate is still too slow. This is even more complex within some specific assets, such as social housing, which, especially in Italy, depends on the availability of public funds. The study proposes a predictive tool conceived as an enabler in the decision-making process, capable of considering and comparing the performance levels that different retrofitting actions can reach, according to building features, intervention costs, timing, and resource availability. The tool is tested on a social housing case study in Bologna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing is the main environmental impact generator (62 %) of the whole building sector, but it also has the greatest reduction potential. Enhancing its performance is thus crucial to sustainable development. Social Housing (SH) represents a critical asset within the residential segment, due to the recurrent investment shortage and several environmental, social, and economic related implications. In Italy, SH is held by around one hundred public agencies facing endemic resource constraints for both maintenance and retrofitting, which are limited further by a diffused lack of information regarding the conditions and features of the buildings they manage. In cooperation with an Italian SH agency (ACER Bologna), we developed a speedy tool to compare the technical and economic effects of different refurbishment scenarios on a case-by-case basis. This is not a tool to manage retrofitting works, as the many already available, but a means to help large housing managers overcome the intention-action gap that limit their capacity to properly prioritize interventions based on reliable information. The research focuses on the validation of the fast procedure for estimating the baseline energy scenario, arguing that the relatively small inaccuracies are irrelevant for the scope of the tool and are compensated for by the time saved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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