GIS-based Life Cycle Assessment of urban building stocks retrofitting. A bottom-up framework applied to Luxembourg

Abstract

The building sector represents one of the major sources of environmental impact due especially to space and domestic hot water heating and construction works. A number of studies focused so far on estimating the energy savings and carbon emissions reduction potential achievable by retrofitting urban building stocks, nevertheless a shift to life cycle assessment is needed to properly assess the environmental impacts in a more holistic way. The aim of this study is to develop a geospatial data model for the life cycle assessment of environmental impacts of building stocks at the urban scale. The methodology includes: geospatial processing of building-related data to characterize urban building stocks; a spatio-temporal database to store and manage data; life cycle assessment to estimate potential environmental impacts. The methodology was tested for a case study in Luxembourg and preliminary results regarding the retrofitting stage of residential buildings were provided for one entire city. The data model is part of a wider bottom-up framework being developed to support decision about building stock retrofitting for sustainable urban planning.