Regional building stock performance: Identifying barriers to the design, construction, and operation of high-performing buildings

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The operation, construction, and renovation of building infrastructure accounts for a significant portion of Canada's energy use and GHG emissions and the quality of building indoor environments substantially impacts human quality of life in terms of health, comfort, and productivity. Building infrastructure is not only technically complex, but is also integrated with complex political, social, and economic systems. While there are many established best practices for the design, construction, and operation of buildings, failure to integrate these practices into our built environment is common. As a result, the full performance improvements offered by these practices are not realized and the extent to which specific poor practices are present in our building stocks and the impacts on performance metrics (e.g., energy use) are not well understood. To improve building stock performance, a foundational understanding of the typical operation, performance, and technical shortcomings of regional building stocks is needed. Further, to encourage the adoption of best practices in building design, construction, and operation, interdisciplinary research that focuses on the ways interactions between political, social, economic, and technical systems influence building design, construction, and operations outcomes is needed. The proposed research uses a uses a novel methodology which combines data-driven methods with qualitative, participatory methods to elicit the underlying causes of roadblocks to achieving healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities and develop new approaches to eliminate or mitigate these barriers through policy, process, and technical interventions related to buildings infrastructure. This research will examine residential, commercial, and institutional regional building stocks in urban areas and remote, northern and indigenous communities in Canada and has four objectives: 1.Develop tools and methods for regional-scale building performance data collection; 2.Characterize building stock operation and identify common technical shortcomings in building design, construction, and operation on a regional scale; 3.Identify existing leverage points in political, social, and economic systems that can be used to improve technical performance; and 4.Recommend interventions to address key limitations and improve performance. This research will develop new methods and tools to collect building operation data and diagnose shortcomings on a regional scale. Using these tools, this research program characterizes the performance and technical shortcomings of our building stock and identify key areas for improvement. Further, through systemic analysis, this research will identify the techno-socio-economic leverage points which can be targeted by new policies and programs to effectively improve building performance in an equitable manner, reducing the likelihood of policy-implementation gaps or creation of undue burden on vulnerable populations.