Smartness to reduce environmental impacts

The SmartBuilt4EU project has set up four task forces investigating issues related to smart buildings: their objective is to identify the remaining challenges and barriers to smart building deployment, and the associated research and innovation gaps that should be addressed in the near future. 

The topic investigated in 2022 addressed the smartness to reduce environmental impacts. The way we live in the built environment needs to become more sustainable - and even go beyond sustainability, towards “regenerative” buildings that will both restore and improve the natural environment (and humans likewise). Most of the environmental impacts of buildings are generated during the operation phase, the main impacts being on energy use (fossil fuels) and climate change.

The operational energy can indeed vary between 70% and 90% of the whole life cycle energy consumption of a building, whilst the embodied energy generally ranges between 10% and 30%. Beyond climate change mitigation, the minimisation of environmental impacts should also tackle other key challenges: ecosystem quality, human health and wellbeing, resource availability. Smart technologies can support this change of paradigm, from “less bad” to “more regenerative”.

However the way smart systems can contribute to the reduction of environmental impacts (beyond operational energy), is still to be investigated. And the environmental impacts of the devices themselves as well as potential rebound effects are a cause for concern which has to be addressed.

This white paper therefore aims to provide an overview on what is known and what should be further investigated to answer the following questions:

• Is there a direct link between a building’s smartness and automation level and the reduction of the environmental impacts linked with the operational phase of the building?
• If so, is it possible to quantify the net benefit taking into account the emissions released in the entire lifecycle of the installed smart devices?

In its first part, this paper provides a state of the art regarding the following points, with specific attention being paid to EC-funded projects:

• Environmental impacts that can be reduced by smartness,
• Smart tools, devices and solutions to reduce the environmental impacts of a building,
• Environmental impacts of the devices themselves.

A brainstorming process then enabled to identification of some key barriers and drivers regarding the optimisation of building costs.  Based on the State of the Art and the barriers and drivers, a number of research and innovation gaps were identified including R&D, Demo, regulation & legal framework, certification & standardisation and scaling up & industrialisation.