"DECO2"
DYNAMIC DECARBONISATION PATHWAYS FRAMEWORK INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGICAL, SOCIAL, AND POLICY INNOVATIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE RENOVATIONS IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
DESCRIPTION
The building sector holds a prominent position in energy consumption (40%) and CO2 emissions (36%) within the European Union.
Furthermore, current construction and renovation practices are huge raw material consumers and highly waste producers. In response to this critical issue, the European Union has established ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Green Deal initiative. Initiatives such as the Digital Product Passport are introduced to foster circularity principles across sectors and
transparency about products' life cycle impacts on the environment. Despite the efforts, on an EU scale, around 75% of buildings remain energy inefficient and in need of renovation or retrofitting to improve their energy performance. Renovation rates are far below the minimum required, now only reaching around 1% of the building stock per year. These drawbacks bring forward the
impact of rising material extraction, shrunk global circularity from to 7.2% in 2023. To facilitate closing this performance and design-to-market gap in the built environment, DeCO2 proposes a data-driven dynamic decarbonization pathways framework to foster circular economy principles in the built environment . In this regard, a comprehensive and integrated approach is proposed encompassing technological innovations, active social engagement, and effective policy interventions that will contribute to establishing appropriate innovation pathways to speed up circularity and energy retrofit rate across Europe. A holistic bottom-up approach is introduced to embrace the entire building-life cycle and all the relevant stakeholders involved in each stage to ensure maximizing the involvement of every link in the value chain, including local ecosystems and regional innovation clusters in close-to market innovative (TRL 6-7) renovation systems, materials, and techniques that contribute to space users' overall health and well-being, comfort and inclusivity.
OBJECTIVES
PO1: Implement and showcase circular and technological innovations that contribute to the decarbonization of the built environment by integrating new eco-friendly and recyclable materials, cutting-edge digital manufacturing techniques (including 3D printing and Robotics), and novel data-driven pathways across the local or regional level value chain.
PO2: Foster social innovation by people-centred, inclusive, creativity-driven, participatory processes activities for the development, implementation, and post-occupancy assessment of sustainable renovation solutions.
Decarbonization pathways urge immediate behavioral shifts regarding the use and interaction with novel clean energy technologies and methods for climate neutrality. Decarbonizing the building stock through construction, demolition and renovation practices require actions to be tailored to occupant behaviour, technology and materials availability and changing local climate conditions.
PO3: Promote policy innovation by providing practical guidelines to public authorities, policy makers and other stakeholders on how to implement decarbonisation pathways, highlighting the challenges and enabling conditions to overcome them. This will be based on 'real-life' cases demonstrating what implementing decarbonisation means in practical terms through demonstrative regulatory sandboxes.
PO4: Demonstrate the effectiveness and viability of innovative digital solutions, low disruptive construction and retrofitting processes on three physical demonstrators (demo cases) with policy innovation activities regarding national regulatory sandboxes through the integration of technological, social, and circular innovations.
PO5: Assess the scalability and replicability of the demonstrated built environment decarbonization pathways for wider adoption by deploying the innovation pathways on three demonstrated Living Labs. DeCO2 will build on its demonstrations to replicate the framework in other contexts, by increasing the knowledge-base and practicality experience about circular data-driven decarbonisation solutions in the built environment.
