Methodologies for the assessment of the combined seismic and energy retrofit of existing buildings: a new simplified method and application to case studies

The urgent need to accelerate the renovation rate of the EU built environment, making it more energy-efficient and less carbon intensive over its entire life cycle, is a key-priority for the EU climate-neutrality goal by 2050. This report introduces a simplified integrated 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 obtaining a global assessment result in economic terms. The development of a user-friendly method 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 can gain by combining seismic and energy retrofit technologies. Existing methodologies for the seismic and energy retrofit assessment of existing buildings are first reviewed with the Sustainable Structural Design (SDD) methodology resulting particularly noteworthy. Hence, it is considered as point of reference to introduce a simplified combined assessment method, consisting of four steps: input information, selection of techniques, integrated retrofit design and evaluation, and optimised solutions. Finally, four case studies referring to EU representative residential and non-residential building typologies needing combined seismic and energy retrofit are identified to apply both the selected standard (i.e. SSD methodology) and the proposed simplified combined assessment method.