Assessment methodologies for the combined seismic and energy retrofit of existing buildings

The renovation of the EU existing built environment to make it more energy-efficient and less carbon intensive over its entire life cycle, as emphasised by the Renovation Wave strategy within the European Green Deal, assumes a key-role to meet the ambitious goal of a climate-neutral society and economy by 2050. However, the European existing building stock, mainly located in the EU seismic-prone regions, also suffers from seismic vulnerability leading to detrimental social, economic, and environmental impacts in case of an earthquake. Hence, it is essential to boost integrated renovation interventions aimed at simultaneously enhancing the seismic and energy performances of buildings to effectively achieve a safe, resilient and sustainable building sector.
This report introduces a simplified method for the assessment of the combined seismic and energy retrofit of existing buildings, along with their environmental performance, in a life-cycle perspective by achieving a global assessment result in economic terms. The development of a user-friendly method, which exploits a simplified common language (i.e. monetary units), to assess the potential improvements achieved in a combined renovation project is essential to ease and speed up the knowledge of benefits that different stakeholders e.g. owners, industry, policy makers, etc., can gain by combining seismic safety and energy efficiency retrofit technologies, thus overcoming renovation barriers, such as intervention cost, execution time, inhabitants’ relocation, institutional and administrative issues. The proposed simplified assessment method considers the Sustainable Structural Design (SSD) methodology (developed in the framework of the JRC activity SAFESUST) as point of reference for its introduction. Both methods are applied to four case studies referring to EU representative residential and non-residential building typologies needing combined seismic and energy retrofit, demonstrating the renovation benefits in economic terms.