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Increased awareness of climate change has precipitated more stringent mitigation targets. Public sector institutions in Canada are committed to becoming carbon neutral to attain a leadership position in climate change mitigation-related initiatives. Recent statistics reveal that buildings account for the majority of the corporate carbon footprint of public sector institutions. Hence, there is an increasing interest towards developing net zero energy and net zero emission buildings to comply with climate action targets. With limited financial resources, public sector institutions must optimize investments into building energy retrofits by considering lifecycle cost (LCC), overall energy performance, and related greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. The aim of this paper is to develop an investment planning approach for net zero emission buildings (NZEB). First, an investment planning approach for NZEB is proposed. A typical recreational centre building in British Columbia, Canada, was used as the archetype to demonstrate the concept. Second, innovative and proven building energy retrofits were analysed using energy simulation software to assess the impact on energy consumption reduction, GHG emissions, and LCC. Third, impacts of geographical location, tariff regimes, and grid emission factors on energy retrofits were studied by locating the same building in other provinces of Canada. This study revealed that net zero energy investment has a strong correlation to the grid emission factor. The proposed approach in this paper will assist building managers and owners in retrofitting and budget planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The building industry has regularly been criticized for resource exploitation, energy use, waste production, greenhouse gas emissions, and impacts on the landscape. The growing population demands more built environment to accommodate the socioeconomic wellbeing. Adopting conventional construction practices would continue the aforementioned issues. Therefore, it is important to integrate life cycle thinking into building construction to minimize its social, environmental, and economic impacts. The objective of this study is to assess the life cycle impact of commonly used wall-roof systems for low rise commercial building construction in Canada. A framework is developed to assess different building alternatives using the triple bottom line of sustainability. Identified environmental and socioeconomic impact indicators are eventually aggregated to develop a life cycle impact index. Material quantities of six wall-roof combinations for a single-storey commercial building were obtained from industrial partners. State-of-the-art life cycle assessment software is used to assess the life cycle impacts of different wall-roof systems. To accommodate decision makers' preferences of sustainability, wall-roof combinations are assessed for three potential scenarios namely, eco-centric, neutral, and economy-centric using multi-criteria decision analysis. The framework has also been implemented on a case study of low rise building in Calgary (Alberta, Canada) to evaluate its practicality. The study results revealed that the concrete-steel building is the most sustainable alternative in neutral and economy-centric scenario while steel-wood building is the most sustainable building in eco-centric scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]