ETH Energy Blog: Why we should change the way we environmentally assess building retrofits

Building retrofits are increasingly assessed from an environmental perspective. However, standard assessment methods broadly do not consider future developments and fail to consider the state of climate emergency where the time horizon is substantially shorter than the expected building lifetime. Therefore a more forward-looking analysis is required. Including global warming, electricity decarbonization, and aligning the analysis period with 2050 goals give greater weight to material-based embodied emissions. I, therefore, claim that construction materials are substantially more relevant in the fight against global warming than currently considered in most assessments.

Read the entire article by Linus Walker on the ETH Energy Blog.