Environmental impacts assessment for Australian buildings: thermal resistance and environmental impacts relationship

Abstract

Selecting suitable construction designs for efficient energy management and moderating greenhouse gas emissions regarding to a construction project's life-cycle of are typically demanding to designers in the fight with climate change across the global. Scientists are striving to develop building optimization models so that strategies are ably devised to moderate energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions simultaneously. An inclusive greenhouse gas emissions valuation model is established to utilise several types of buildings envelop, which is adhered to the National Construction Building Code of Australia - energy efficiency requirement. The extracted results are exported from GaBi version 8.1 and consolidated by Visual Basic in Microsoft Excel to calculate greenhouse gas emissions amount in regard to building's energy consumption in 50 years. Accordingly, Credit 15A which is one of five pathways in the category: Green-Star's greenhouse gas emissions reduction (Green-Star is the rating tool to enhance a project's sustainability during its life-cycle) will be used to assess by selecting the wall structures following the guidance in the Insulation Council of Australia and New Zealand (2014) handbook. With the model, designers and planners probably apply the optimum envelope structure types with the relevant R-value options for their design.