Energy Efficiency, Socio-Economic and Environmental Sustainability in Buildings and Civil Works
A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "G: Energy and Buildings".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 October 2019) | Viewed by 14079
Special Issue Editors
Interests: renewable energies; energy efficiency; energy planning; environmental impact; sustainable engineering; energy efficiency in building; urban planning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: environmental sustainability; life cycle assessment; buildings energy efficiency
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
A built environment is a spatial, material, and cultural product of human activities conceived to combine physical elements and energy to support living, working, and playing. It plays multiple key roles in todays’ societies and can be considered as the result of many socioeconomic factors and processes that contribute to determine the way to proceed towards sustainable development.
Despite of this, the built environment is the biggest contributor to emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), accounting for up to 50% of the global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2): buildings with plants contribute some of the largest impacts. This is mainly because of construction activities consuming enormous quantities of raw materials: about 40% of the annual global material use takes place in the building construction sector. Additionally, the energy consumption associated with the life cycle of buildings accounts for around 40% of the global demand. This is reflected on an average basis in the European context, where the energy required for indoor heating represents the main share of the total energy consumed in buildings.
Therefore, there is a need to face today's environmental and socio-economic challenges. To this end, the building sector should be oriented towards solutions that are sustainable in a holistic, integrated approach, whilst enabling reducing consumption of both material and energy in the life cycle of a building.
Therefore, evaluations and considerations of both the energy, environmental, and socio-economic performance of a building and of its connected plants should regard its whole life cycle through the application of internationally recognized methods such as the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). This and other related methodologies are very powerful tools to address trade-offs, both between life cycle stages and between different sustainability pillars. In this context, this Special Issue arises with the aim of motivating prominent researchers to investigate the building sector and share their results. This will make it possible to create a reliable and up-to-date picture of the state-of-the-art on LCSA applications of buildings and civil works.
Prof. Dr. Antonio Messineo
Dr. Carlo Ingrao
Dr. Domenico Panno
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Energies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- energy efficiency
- renewable energy
- life cycle assessment
- environmental sustainability
- socio-economic sustainability
- buildings
- civil works
- refrigerating engineering
- dynamic thermal-energy simulation
- cooling/heating
- air conditioning plants
- smart material
- sustainable building material
- continuous hygro-thermal monitoring
