A new functionality for the digital building logbook: Assessing the progress of decarbonisation of national building sectors

Abstract

The EU has set itself demanding objectives to achieve complete decarbonisation by 2050. The building sector plays an important role for this purpose, hence monitoring its progress towards decarbonisation is essential to identify measures that work and to readjust policies when necessary. However, collecting information to monitor the building sector is a complex task due to the scarcity and low quality of available data. The European digital building logbook (DBL) has great potential in this regard because it allows the collection of data at the building scale, which could be combined at a national level. Thus, this paper proposes a new functionality for the DBL -as an enabler for the collection of data for the assessment of the progress of the main EU policy objectives related to the building sector decarbonisation-, and it evaluates the potential of the DBL for it. To do so, the main policy objectives were associated to a set of progress indicators –mandatory and optional- and matched to DBL indicators. Mandatory indicators are for all Member States and they have been included in the 2023 amended version of the proposal for the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive recast. Optional indicators are considered country-specific in this paper and are sourced from various literature references. Here we have studied the optional progress indicators for the case of Spain. Results show that the DBL has great potential to contribute to the collection of more than half of the mandatory indicators and a very high share of the optional ones for Spain.