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SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Project Overview.

Retrofitting the existing housing stock represents a huge potential in actions to mitigate climate change and achieve the UK’s carbon neutral targets. There are also wider benefits from retrofit investments in addition to those of environmental aspects, such as improved health & well-being of occupants or fuel poverty reduction and job/employment creation and local economic growth.

However, these social-related benefits are not easily articulated or measured during the decision-making process of many retrofit investments. There is therefore a need for robust tools that allow a wholistic appraisal of investments in retrofit programmes/projects to evaluate their full benefits comprehensively. Doing so has the potential to strengthen the justification needed for retrofit investments especially in the social housing sector where retrofitting yields the greatest impacts.

This research project at the Nottingham Trent University’s School of Architecture Design and Built Environment seeks to develop a measurement framework tool that can be used to capture these social benefits and impacts in a systematic way and quantify them in economic terms to allow for robust and informed retrofit investment decision-making for social landlords and their residents/tenants.

The aim
As part of this study, the research team is undertaking data collection with social housing experts and practitioners in order to understand any existing retrofit evaluation tools and methods and to identify benefits of retrofits from their respective. This will generate a set of indicators of retrofit benefits. Experts will also be consulted on methods and criteria for scoring these indicators.

The research team will produce a framework and a set of tools for systematically identifying and measuring benefits of retrofit investments, which can be used by all
stakeholders, such as policymakers, social landlords, supply chain partners, community groups and residents themselves.

The benefits for the social housing sector

• The output of this project will be a measurement tool that could help social housing associations to evaluate their retrofit programmes and measure the socio-economic impacts/benefits from the same.
• It will aid in better decision-making for retrofit investments in terms of selecting the most relevant strategies to achieve certain benefits.
• It will also help in the evaluation of retrofit project performance by providing a systematic and comprehensive framework to guide the entire process

Contact the Research Team
For more enquiries or concerns regarding this research, please contact:
Michael Asinyaka: michael.asinyaka2019@my.ntu.ac.uk, or Ming Sun (Prof): ming.sun@ntu.ac.uk or Emmanuel Manu (Dr): emmanuel.manu@ntu.ac.uk.