This paper deals with the problem that actual building regulations do not reflect the climate targets set by the Paris Agreement. To address this, a benchmark was developed for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of buildings on the basis of the Emissions Gap Report. We first applied an equal allocation of the GHG emission limit for 2030 among the forecasted population to calculate a virtual personal GHG emission limit. We took a proportion of this personal limit for the purpose of housing and extrapolated it for the whole building based on the number of occupants. We also undertook a case study of an actual multifamily residential building and compared its standard design to the benchmark using a simplified life cycle assessment (LCA) method in line with the national SBToolCZ method. The results showed that the assessed residential house exceeded the emission requirement by a factor of 2.5. Based on the assessment, six sets of saving measures were proposed to reduce the operational and embodied GHG emissions. The saving measures included change in temperature zoning, improvement of the U-values of the building envelope, exchange of construction materials for reduced embodied GHG emissions, exchange of heat source for biomass boiler, introduction of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting, use of mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, addition of vacuum solar collectors, and the addition of photovoltaic (PV) panels. Finally, the variants were compared and their suitability in the Czech conditions was examined.
Carbon Benchmark for Czech Residential Buildings Based on Climate Goals Set by the Paris Agreement for 2030
