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Crucial transition of the Indian residential building sector into a low-emission economy require an in-depth understanding of the potentials for retrofitting the existing building stock. There are, however, limited studies that have recognised the interdependencies and trade-offs in the embodied energy and life cycle impact assessment of retrofit interventions. This research appraises the life cycle assessment and embodied energy output of a residential building in India to assess the environmental implications of selected retrofit scenarios.

This study utilises a single case study building project in South India to assess the effectiveness and impact of three retrofit scenarios based on life cycle assessment (LCA) and embodied energy (EE) estimates. The LCA was conducted using SimaPro version 9.3 and with background data from Ecoinvent database version 3.81. The EE estimates were calculated using material coefficients from relevant databases in the published literature. Monte Carlo Simulation is then used to allow for uncertainties in the estimates for the scenarios.

The three key findings that materialized from the study are as follows: (1) the retrofitting of Indian residential buildings could achieve up to 20% reduction in the life cycle energy emissions, (2) the modification of the building envelope and upgrading of the building service systems could suffice in providing optimum operational energy savings, if the electricity from the grid is sourced from renewable plants, and (3) the production of LEDs and other building services systems has the highest environmental impacts across a suite of LCA indicators.

The retrofitting of residential buildings in India will lead to better and improved opportunities to meet the commitments in the Paris Climate Change Agreement and will lead to enhanced savings for building owners.

Heritage buildings are a crucial part of the UK built sector. They perpetuate a sense of identity, prestige and community. Many heritage buildings however tend to be energy inefficient and the scope for retrofitting such buildings is paramount. Heritage buildings require ratification from planning bodies in order to undertake any alteration on the building. This tends to create a bottleneck in the retrofitting of heritage office buildings. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This study utilises a case study building in Scotland to evaluate the potential for retrofitting in a UK heritage office building. Building energy simulation software is used to generate the energy data in different retrofit options. A scenario analysis on the heritage status of the building is also undertaken.

The costs, energy consumption and carbon emission levels are evaluated and compared. It was found that the differential in annual energy savings achieved, based on the proportion of capital cost to operational cost, is 14.6 per cent in the heritage building, compared to 24.6 per cent in the non-heritage building.

The study suggests that government and other stakeholders should seek for ways of incentivising retrofit investments in heritage buildings. This will provide an effective way of minimising the contributions of the built environment to global warming and climate change.

Critical knowledge and lessons learnt from the delivery of infrastructure projects have often remained untapped mainly due to the transient and fragmented nature of construction delivery. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the mediating role of a project facilitator in attenuating disruptions in knowledge flows during the delivery of an infrastructure project.

An inductive case-study method is employed in examining the mediating role of the facilitator in an infrastructure project. Content analysis was undertaken by coding the data derived from eight focus group interactions, 23 semi-structured interviews and 24 documentary sources from workshops using NVivo 12 plus.

(1) The project facilitator provided a coherent context to re-invent the narratives (i.e. behaviours and events) by creating a forum for understanding critical problems and stimulating constructive dialogue and intervention. (2) The project facilitator leveraged on both explicit and tacit knowledge within the team, leading to improvement in the proactive management of emergent technical, operational and behavioural challenges, and (3) The project facilitator sustained a valuable intervention in attenuating disruptions in knowledge flows for problem-solving, relationship-management, best-practice strategies, coaching and leadership, as well as reflexive practice.

The novelty of this research is that a facilitator is used as the “knowledge-broker” in a multi-party infrastructure delivery team assembled using a traditional lump-sum contract framework. Facilitators have only previously been used in collaborative contract environments like alliancing and partnering.

Effective inter-organisational relationships are key to engendering innovation and ensuring the successful delivery of infrastructure projects. Relationship-based contracts are thus widely used to stimulate best-for-project ideals and attenuate the otherwise adversarial relationship that often exists between clients and contractors. This study examines the effectiveness and limitations of a project facilitation model as coaching tool for developing conducive inter-organisational relationships for construction project delivery.

The study adopts a case-study approach using evidence from triangulated data sources of focus group workshops, semi-structured interviews and document analysis.

(1) The facilitation model enabled an environment for psychological safety to be developed, which engendered a platform for effective cooperation for problem-solving and achieving quasi best-for-project ideals. (2) The model provides the mechanism to develop team behaviours that support enhanced performance and create an environment less adversarial and more collaborative than traditional contracting.

The novelty of this research is that relationship-based principles have been utilised as part of a traditional design-bid-build contract with lump-sum payment arrangements.

The main purpose of the study is to promote consideration of the issues and approaches available for costing sustainable buildings with a view to minimising cost overruns, occasioned by conservative whole-life cost estimates. The paper primarily looks at the impact of adopting continuity in whole-life cost models for zero carbon houses.

The study embraces a mathematically based risk procedure based on the binomial theorem for analysing the cost implication of the Lighthouse zero-carbon house project. A practical application of the continuous whole-life cost model is developed and results are compared with existing whole-life cost techniques using finite element methods and Monte Carlo analysis.

With standard whole-life costing, discounted present-value analysis tends to underestimate the cost of a project. Adopting continuity in whole-life cost models presents a clearer picture and profile of the economic realities and decision-choices confronting clients and policy-makers. It also expands the informative scope on the costs of zero-carbon housing projects.

A primary limitation in this work is its focus on just one property type as the unit of analysis. This research is also limited in its consideration of initial and running cost categories only. The capital cost figures for the Lighthouse are indicative rather than definitive.

The continuous whole-life cost technique is a novel and innovative approach in financial appraisal […] Benefits of an improved costing framework will be far-reaching in establishing effective policies aimed at client acceptance and optimally performing supply chain networks.

The continuous whole-life costing pioneers an experimental departure from the stereo-typical discounting mechanism in standard whole-life costing procedures.