Alice Moncaster

The Open University · School of Engineering and Innovation

Cement is responsible for 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is predicted to grow with increasing development. The majority is used in concrete, globally the most common material in buildings. Reducing emissions from the use of cement and concrete in buildings is therefore critical in order to limit global warming. However there remain mult...

Approximately 20% of UK buildings can be defined as ‘heritage buildings’, offering unique values that should be preserved. They tend to use more energy than newer buildings, creating a strong case for energy retrofits to reduce energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and improve thermal comfort. However, few studies of heritage retrofits examine embo...

Building lifetime and stock turnover are both key determinants in modelling building energy and carbon. However in China, aside from anecdotal claims that urban residential buildings are generally short-lived, there are no recent official statistics, and empirical data are extremely limited. We present a system dynamics model where survival analysi...

This paper publishes the results from a major five year International Energy Agency research project which investigated the reduction of embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions over the whole life (‘cradle to grave’) of buildings. Annex 57 collated and analysed over 80 detailed quantitative and qualitative building case studies from the partic...

This paper considers why the decision may be made either to demolish or adapt existing buildings on brownfield sites and compares real-life decisions to those produced by theoretical design-support tools. Five case studies, including three individual buildings and two master plan sites of multiple buildings, were investigated through interviews wit...

There is a critical need to reduce energy and associated carbon emissions from the existing built environment to help mitigate climate change. This requires significant upscaling of energy retrofitting. However, at present, retrofit assessments commonly consider only the operational impacts, neglecting the embodied carbon of measures. If retrofits...

Increased extreme heat events draw attention to the potential of urban nature as a heat adaptation strategy for cities. This is reflected in multiple scientific perspective pieces, policy documents and science media publications advocating for urban greening as a cooling approach. Although attention to the dangers of heat and the benefits of urban...

Current adaptation theory tends to consider individual buildings or the city level, which cannot address decisions related to masterplan developments on large brownfield sites. This paper investigates the drivers for building demolition or retention and adaptation decisions at the masterplan scale. Expert interviews and three case studies are used...

Reducing energy and associated carbon emissions from the built environment is fundamental to meeting our climate goals. Retrofit of existing buildings is therefore a key strategy. Heritage buildings present particular challenges for retrofitting because of their traditional construction and need to retain historic values. Replacing windows is often...

Reducing energy and associated carbon emissions from the existing built environment is critically important to meet our climate goals. Heritage buildings are often presented in the literature as energy inefficient, and uncomfortable to inhabit. There is however little research into residents’ perceptions of comfort in these buildings to support thi...

Sustainable building design practices are influenced by requirements, guidelines, criteria for green procurement and certification, assessment tools such as life cycle assessment, etc. This study investigates how such artefacts support or define aspirations towards sustainability, through case studies of public housing projects in Sweden and Cyprus...

China is the largest driver of growth in the global building sector. The longstanding construction boom across China has generated a massive flow of materials with significant associated embodied energy consumption and carbon emissions. Despite the serious implications for global emissions, there exist a very limited number of macro-level studies o...

This paper is the second output of a project that examines the embodied greenhouse gas emissions (‘embodied carbon’) from the use of concrete in buildings. In the current absence of either regulation or widespread industry practice in quantified carbon assessment, it seems likely that messaging will play a powerful role in influencing designers’ pe...

This paper examines how global trade shapes and intensifies disasters. Juxtaposing three basic, everyday consumer goods – a t- shirt, a brick, and a tea bag – with disasters manifesting in their respective global supply chains, it high-lights how climate change, local environmental degradation, and carbon emissions are dynamically shaped by consump...

Environmental product declarations (EPD) to EN 15804 provide information about the embodied carbon dioxide of construction products – their life cycle greenhouse gas emissions – alongside reporting the use of renewable and non-renewable primary energy and secondary fuels, among the other environmental indicators. As the number of EPD to EN 15804 in...

Building stock turnover is one of the key determinants in building energy modelling and policy analysis. Building lifetime is integral to the dynamics of stock turnover. However in China, despite anecdotal claims that urban residential buildings are generally short-lived, there are no official statistics on building lifetime, and empirical data is...

The carbon embodied in buildings is an important proportion of our emissions and needs to be radically reduced in order to support climate change mitigation. The highest proportion of embodied carbon is usually emitted during the product stage, and within the structural elements. Therefore, reducing the carbon embodied in the structural materials i...

Disasters like floods, droughts and landslides are a growing risk for millions of people in the global South. Yet in our globalising world, they are increasingly connected to processes originating in the global North. Focusing on imports from Cambodia, Sri Lanka and the South Asian ‘brick belt’, this project examines how British trade shapes the di...

Infrastructure is critical for the economic and social prosperity of society. Some large infrastructure projects are also critical for the future of society due to their intergenerational nature and long lifespan. Understanding the social value of infrastructure is therefore important to deliver a socially successful as well as technically successf...

Two key benefits of building retention and adaptation, over demolition and new build are identified in the academic literature as: the conservation of heritage, and reductions in embodied greenhouse gas emissions from construction materials. A four-year research project, including expert interviews, focus groups and three detailed case studies, dev...

Significant energy and carbon originate in the existing built environment and retrofit is therefore a key carbon reduction strategy. However heritage buildings -comprising around 20% of UK buildings- are challenging to retrofit appropriately due to their historical values and traditional construction. Retrofit carbon savings are dependent on curren...

What are the opportunities and challenges for upscaling the energy retrofit of heritage buildings? Heritage buildings comprise approximately 20% of the UK building stock and are challenging to retrofit sensitively because of their heritage values and traditional construction. These buildings may therefore be unconducive to standard retrofitting app...

With one of the highest carbon footprints, the construction sector should be at the forefront of climate action. Reducing embodied impacts of construction also means ensuring that buildings are durable, low maintenance, and fit for purpose, while maximizing resource efficiency. However, thirty years in to research in this field, embodied impacts co...

This chapter considers how circularity is being, and might be, approached and achieved within the built environment. Three case studies illustrate the current situation. The first case address life cycle assessment (LCA) in measuring circularity, showing that while LCA encourages recycling it gives little support to Design for Disassembly. The seco...

The application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique to a building requires the collection and organization of a large amount of data over its life cycle. The systematic decomposition method can be used to classify building components, elements and materials, overcome specific difficulties that are encountered when attempting to complete th...

Knowing the size of building stock is perhaps the most basic determinant in assessing energy use in buildings. However, official statistics on urban residential stock for many countries are piecemeal at best. Previous studies estimating stock size and energy use make various debateable methodological assumptions and only produce deterministic resul...

Promoting the decarbonisation of buildings requires effective policy measures. An integral part of policy design is ex-ante evaluation of possible policy options and effects. System Dynamics, one of a range of potential modelling paradigms, emphasises the dynamic complexity arising from stock-and-flow structures, feedbacks, non-linearities and time...

In the Mediterranean region façade shading systems are used to reduce operational energy, particularly cooling loads. However, operational savings do not necessarily translate into net energy savings unless they outweigh the embodied energy/carbon required to manufacture, install, maintain, and dispose of these systems. This study analyses two shad...

This paper identifies the need for Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) to provide End of Life (EoL) and Module D data for products for use in building level Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Although the provision of data for EN 15804 Modules A4-D is not currently mandatory for EPD, many currently report some or all of these. This paper provides an...

This Special Issue of the "International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology" focuses on the issue of gender, and of how gender intersects with other aspects of diversity, in engineering. Published in 2019 in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Women's Engineering Society, and to coincide with the International Women in Engineering Da...

The British Standards Institute has recently published the world's first standard on the circular economy. The standard is intentionally broad and inclusive to suit all types of organisations and products. However, when it comes to complex products such as buildings-with large numbers of stakeholders, long lifespans and high uncertainties about fut...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used as an early-stage design-decision tool to support choices of structural system. However LCA modellers must first make numerous methodological decisions, and the resultant wide variations in approach are often inadequately described by the modellers. This paper identifies, and quantifies, the three ma...

With more intense rainfall and sea level rises predicted, an increasing number of people across the UK are vulnerable to flood events. The government has pledged more funding for flood infrastructure planning, design and management. However, schemes tend to focus on technical solutions, with the social impact, including needs and concerns of the lo...

The dominance of operational energy and related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of most existing buildings is decreasing in new construction, when primary fossil energy of building operation decreases as result of the implementation of energy efficiency measures as well as a decarbonisation of national energy mixes. Stakeholders therefore have a gro...

In order to meet the mid-century carbon reduction targets and to mitigate climate change and global warming it is imperative that embodied greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions in the built environment receive immediate attention from policy, industry and academia. While academic research has grown in recent years, the uptake of embodied carbon assessm...

This chapter explores the range of decisions and the reasons behind them when considering demolition and adaptation on a masterplan site in which multiple buildings are affected. It builds upon existing studies on adaptive reuse and demolition at an individual building level. The chapter identifies factors as drivers for decisions to demolish or ad...

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art on this subject within Europe. In order to do so, it draws on a cross-case analysis of over 60 European case studies, developed and analysed by the authors as part of the International Energy Agency Annex 57 project.

Embodied and operational carbon are both an important part of the built environment's impact on climate change. Two mitigation strategies identified for reducing embodied and lifecycle emissions include refurbishing existing buildings or demolishing existing buildings and replacing them with more efficient new buildings. This paper explores existin...

This book provides a single-source reference for whole life embodied impacts of buildings. The comprehensive and persuasive text, written by over 50 invited experts from across the world, offers an indispensable resource both to newcomers and to established practitioners in the field. Ultimately it provides a persuasive argument as to why embodied...

The most recent 2017 statistics have seen a small increase in women holding technical roles in UK industry. However, despite years of attention from industry leaders, activists and government, the built environment sector has failed to achieve female participation anywhere close to parity. Meanwhile, construction continues to suffer from a poor pub...

The importance of embodied energy and embodied greenhouse gas emissions (EEG) from buildings is gaining increased interest within building sector initiatives and on a regulatory level. In spite of recent harmonisation efforts, reported results of EEG from building case studies display large variations in numerical results due to variations in the c...

This paper investigates the inclusion of renewables in building life cycle assessments. On-site renewable electricity generation is increasingly common in the built environment, but existing guidance for the inclusion of these renewable systems in design-stage life cycle assessment is limited. The life cycle assessment of a building with 42.8 kWpea...

The current regulations to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from buildings have focused on operational energy consumption. Thus legislation excludes measurement and reduction of the embodied energy and embodied GHG emissions over the building life cycle. Embodied impacts are a significant and growing proportion and it is...

Colegio Rochester is school in Colombia with a strong vision for sustainability. This vision permeates the new school building which was the first school in Latin America to be awarded a LEED Gold certification. This article uses Colegio Rochester as a case study to understand how the individual roles and interactions between stakeholders, includin...

Colombia is increasingly acknowledging the role that bioclimatic design of buildings can play within both environmental sustainability — through reductions in energy consumption and GHG emissions — and social sustainability — through the promotion of vernacular architecture and the reconnection of citizens with their surrounding environment. Façad...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is becoming increasingly mainstream as an early-stage design-decision tool for buildings. Still, there are considerable variations in how the method is currently used, leading to limitations in comparing the results and the conclusions that can be drawn. These variations are due to several factors and LCA modellers must...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly becoming a common technique to assess the embodied energy and carbon of buildings and their components over their life cycle. However, the vast majority of existing LCAs result in very definite, deterministic values which carry a false sense of certainty and can mislead decisions and judgments. This artic...

Circular economy is quickly gaining momentum across numerous research fields. The founding principles of circular economies lie in a different perspective on, and management of, resources under the idea that an ever-growing economic development and profitability can happen without an ever-growing pressure on the environment. As such, the built envi...

This paper considers why the decision may be made either to demolish or adapt existing buildings on brownfield sites and compares real-life decisions to those produced by theoretical design-support tools. Five case studies, including three individual buildings and two master plan sites of multiple buildings, were investigated through interviews wit...

This book charts the path toward high performance sustainable buildings and the smart dwellings of the future. The volume clearly explains the principles and practices of high performance design, the uses of building information modelling (BIM), and the materials and methods of smart construction. Power Systems, Architecture, Material Science, Civi...

Embodied and whole life carbon of buildings are increasingly gaining attention. However, embodied carbon calculation is still far from being common practice for sustainability assessment of buildings. Some of its greatest difficulties lie with the long life span of buildings which implies a great unpredictability of future scenarios and high uncert...

Lowering the embodied carbon dioxide equivalent (embodied CO2e) of buildings is an essential response to national and global targets for carbon reduction. Globally, construction industry is developing tools, databases and practices for measuring embodied CO2e in buildings and recommending routes to reduction. While the TC350 developed standardized...

Lowering the embodied carbon dioxide equivalent (embodied CO2e) of buildings is an essential response to national and global targets for carbon reduction. Globally, construction industry is developing tools, databases and practices for measuring embodied CO2e in buildings and recommending routes to reduction. While the TC350 developed standardized...

The built environment puts major pressure on the natural environment; its role in transitioning to a circular economy (CE) is therefore fundamental. However, current CE research tends to focus either on the macro-scale, such as eco-parks, or the micro-scale, such as manufactured products, with the risk of ignoring the additional impacts and potenti...

The built environment puts major pressure on the natural environment; its role in transitioning to a circular economy (CE) is therefore fundamental. However, current CE research tends to focus either on the macro-scale, such as eco-parks, or the micro-scale, such as manufactured products, with the risk of ignoring the additional impacts and potenti...

Of all industrial sectors, the built environment puts the most pressure on the natural environment, and in spite of significant efforts the International Energy Agency suggests that buildings-related emissions are on track to double by 2050. Whilst operational energy efficiency continues to receive significant attention by researchers, a less well-...

In spite of significant global efforts, the International Energy Agency suggests that buildings-related emissions are on track to double by 2050. Whilst operational energy efficiency continues to receive significant attention by researchers, a less well-researched area is the assessment of embodied carbon in the built environment in order to unders...

Embodied and whole life carbon of buildings are increasingly gaining attention. However, embodied carbon calculation is still far from being common practice for sustainability assessment of buildings. Some of its greatest difficulties lie with the long life lifespan of buildings which implies a great unpredictability of future scenarios and high un...

Circular economy is quickly gaining momentum across numerous research fields. The founding principles of circular economies lie in a different perspective on, and management of, resources under the idea that an ever-growing economic development and profitability can happen without an ever-growing pressure on the environment. As such, the built envi...

Nearly half of the non-domestic building stock in central Europe was constructed between 1961-1990. Partly due to the technical lifespan of façades and building components, most of these buildings are characterised by high energy consumption and thermal discomfort. The sustainable renovation of the non-domestic stock is therefore arguably one of th...

Circular economy is quickly gaining momentum across numerous research fields. The founding principles of circular economies lie in a different perspective on, and management of, resources under the idea that an ever-growing economic development and profitability can happen without an ever-growing pressure on the environment. As such, the built envi...

The majority of carbon emissions arise from the built environment, a fact which has led to a global policy focus on reducing carbon and energy from buildings in use. However, research demonstrates that embodied carbon is also an increasingly significant proportion of the whole life impacts from buildings. Embodied carbon is not yet the subject of r...

Our current generation strives to provide the next crucial stepping stone towards sustainable buildings, delivering energy efficiency measures without compromise in ways which are financially viable. Selecting and implementing simple energy efficiency measures (EEMs) to reduce energy use and become more sustainable can be straightforward. More comp...

In 2014, this journal invited me to edit a special issue on low carbon building. We put out a call for papers that offered new perspectives, crossing boundaries between technical and social research approaches. The six papers selected and published have emanated from university departments and research centres of Engineering, Architecture, Energy,...

This paper argues for an approach to flood alleviation design that considers the need not only for technical knowledge, but also a social perspective. It is predicted that more intense rainfall and rising sea levels will result in a greater number of people vulnerable to flood events. Flood alleviation design in the UK is often focused upon technic...

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Athens Institute for Education and Research via http://www.athensjournals.gr/technology/2015-2-1-1-Gavotsis.pdf

Now Open Access from http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showOpenAccess?journalCode=rbri20#.VTC__JMYPX8 The 1997-2010 UK Government’s priorities for education and improved social equality led to the development of two major school building programmes, the Academies programme and Building Schools for the Future (BSF). Political concerns for social,...

Recent studies have shown that the importance of embodied carbon is growing in relation to assessing the environmental impact of buildings. This paper investigates how designers are looking to tackle this, and the effectiveness of some of the methods chosen. Although a number of commercial and non-commercial organisations are developing in-house to...

This paper introduces the IEA Annex 57 case study method, consisting of a format for describing individual case studies and an evaluation matrix covering all case studies. Sample case studies are used to illustrate the method and the evaluation matrix through a first preliminary analysis. In compiling and evaluation existing, transparent case studi...

As buildings become more energy efficient in their operation, embodied energy and carbon become increasingly important. However, there is limited information to allow accurate comparisons of products. Moreover, construction projects are quite complex, not only regarding environmental issues, but also processes and stakeholders. The study of timber...

This paper introduces the IEA Annex 57 case study method, consisting of a format for describing individual case studies and an evaluation matrix covering all case studies. Sample case studies are used to illustrate the method and the evaluation matrix through a first preliminary analysis. In compiling and evaluation existing, transparent case studi...

The argument presented in this paper calls for an approach to flood infrastructure that considers not only the need for a technical perspective in design and construction but also a social perspective. As a result of climate change and changing weather patterns, it is predicted that more intense rainfall will be experienced, as well as rising sea l...