CESARE'24

Built environment and circularity: a review of key determinants

Not scheduled

20m

Speaker

Mafalda Silva (INEGI)

Description

Transitioning towards a sustainable built environment is a key condition for meeting current climate goals, in particular, in the framework of the European Union’s (EU) fit for 55 package and aiming at achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.
While a large deal of attention has been paid to local energy production and energy efficiency; material stocks from the built environment and respective embedded carbon have been relatively less explored. This can be attributed to the complexity both of measuring and addressing (e.g. regulating) the latter.
Nevertheless, as buildings become increasingly efficient and transition to net-zero, to a large extent at the expense of refurbishments and new equipment, it is important to make sure that locked-in carbon is kept to a minimum, from the planning and design stages.
This work investigates what are the determinants or characteristics of the built environment that significantly influence its circularity, and aims at deepening the understanding of the existing links (e.g. synergies, and trade-offs) among different variables of the built environment as a whole (buildings, transport, infrastructure, …). It grounds on the state of-the-art to pull off a comprehensive characterization with variables of interest ranging from not only built form features, but also socio-demographic and behavioural aspects.
This will later feed a machine learning model designed to assess, in an integrated way, the circularity of the built environment. It will be done by building from and expanding a previously validated model with a narrower scope (focused on urban form and energy demand). The development of such modelling tool is expected to have an enormous potential to inform policy making at different levels and to help identifying the most promising circular pathways to carbon neutrality in Europe.