Neighbourhood Digital Modelling of Energy Consumption for Carbon Footprint Assessment

Abstract

Climate change is becoming a dominant concern for advanced countries. The Paris Agreement sets out a global framework for sustainable development performance configuring all climate action related policies. Fast control of CO2 emissions necessarily involves cities since they are responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. A common framework for urban policy impact assessment must be based on architectural design tools and common data repositories for standard digital building models. Many Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment (NSA) tools have been developed but the growing availability of open data repositories for cities, together with big-data sources (provided through Internet of Things repositories), allow accurate neighbourhood simulations, or in other words, digital twins of neighbourhoods. These digital twins are excellent tools for policy impact assessment. This chapter provides a generic approach for a simple neighbourhood model developed from building physical parameters which meets relevant assessment requirements.KeywordsNeighbourhood digital modelSustainability assessmentEnergy simulation