Overview of seismic and energy retrofit technologies for 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 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 provides a simplified analysis for identifying the EU existing buildings most needing combined seismic and energy retrofit, along with a focus on the Italian context due to the huge variability of its building stock. This investigation is essential to facilitate the selection of suitable renovation strategies, useful for practitioners, policy makers, and local authorities. Technologies for seismic and energy retrofit are reviewed and classified to assess their applicability to the investigated building typologies mainly in terms of compatibility, cost, and disruption time to ease the decision making process of different stakeholders, such as investors, clients, policymakers, in the preliminary phase of a renovation design.