Barriers and challenges of the assessment framework of the Commission Recommendation (EU) 2019/786 on building renovation by European RTD projects

Abstract

The refurbishment of buildings is one of the main keys to pursue the targets of the European Green Deal, and to accomplish the European Union has applied two mechanisms among others: the European policy and the European Research and Technological Development (RTD) projects. On the one hand, the EU has published the Commission Recommendation (EU) 2019/786 with an assessment framework composed by Measurable Progress Indicators (MPI) that can be considered the main legal instrument to measure the progress of the decarbonisation together with health & wellness, social and economic related targets of the Directive 2018/844, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). On the other hand, the RTD projects also pursue the targets of the EU but following their own assessment methodology composed by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Considering the parallelism of these two mechanisms, the objective of this study is to analyse the applicability of the EU’s assessment framework by the RTD projects, establishing a critical point of view of the viability of the MPIs and identifying the barriers and challenges of the evaluation system proposed by the EU. Regarding the methodology, the applicability of MPIs by RTD projects has been analysed in five stages: (1) Identification and listing of the MPIs of EU Recommendation; (2) selection of European RTD projects; (3) identification of the KPIs applied by the projects; (4) study of the concordance of the MPIs of the Commission Recommendation’s assessment framework and the KPIs of the RTD projects; (5) evaluation of the barriers and challenges of the applicability of the EU’s MPIs based on the level of agreement with the projects’ KPIs. This investigation shows that although some evaluation scopes of the Commission Recommendation (EU) 2019/786 do agree with high degree with RTD projects, many MPIs present barriers related to the low reliability, the absence of standardised calculation methods, and the lack of data. Besides, the assessment framework of the Commission Recommendation (EU) 2019/786 also presents challenges to improve the evaluation of the building renovation like calibration techniques, standardised input data and the shortlisting of the MPIs to improve the effectiveness of the method. The main conclusion is that the readjustment of the assessment framework proposed in the Recommendation (EU) 2019/786 is needed. This readjustment is proposed to be done by shortlisting the MPIs and defining standardised measurement methods in order to build a common roadmap that could be followed and assessed homogenously towards the decarbonisation of the European building stock.