Unlocking the potential of digital building logbooks to decarbonise the built environment
Demo-BLog, a new EU-funded project under the Horizon 2020 framework, kicked off last month in Delft, Netherlands. The 4-year project aims to unlock the potential of Digital Building Logbooks (DBLs) to accelerate decarbonization of the European building stock through further developing and demonstrating the tool, and fostering its market deployment.
What is a Digital Building Logbook?
A Digital Building Logbook is an all-in-one information tool meant to encourage data transparency and availability and simplify decision-making for stakeholders across the buildings value chain. This includes property owners, tenants, investors, financial institutions and public administrations.
To date, a lack of a common repository for all relevant building data has amounted to additional costs and inefficiencies, stifled innovation, increased risk and low investor confidence. Built environment stakeholders have widely divergent data needs and the information flow is complex.
Digital building logbooks have the potential to help overcome these issues and accelerate Europe’s transition to a climate-neutral building stock, in line with the renovation wave and 2050 climate target.
Demo-BLog: Moving towards increased data transparency
Demo-BLog aims to establish DBLs as a central tool to drive net-zero carbon building design, construction, management and renovation. It will develop a decision support tool to enable local initiatives to identify the best sustainability transition pathways, and demonstrate how a digital building logbook can monitor and evaluate progress of climate and energy transition actions implemented by local governments. To achieve this, it will:
- Further develop 5 existing DBLs in Europe and help them catalyze decarbonization for the European building stock;
- Demonstrate multi-cycle approaches and foster the marketplace for the reuse of construction materials;
- Improve DBLs in terms of data generation, management and governance and identify how to address important data gaps;
- Enhance user experience;
- Foster market deployment and develop concepts for incentivizing uptake of the proposed DBL solutions by different stakeholders.
The project is a 4-year collaborative effort between academia, think-tanks and industry professionals’ at the leading edge of the built environment.
Be on the lookout for updates on the project and join the conversation on Digital Building Logbooks and centralized data repositories by following the hashtag: #DBLupdates on social media.
Project partners
- ACA Group
- Buildings Performance Institute Europe
- Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment
- Chillservices
- Delft University of Technology
- Energy Saving Trust
- Flemish Energy and Climate AgencyCentre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment
- Leap Forward
- Vlaamse Instelling voor Technologisch Onderzoek
- R2M Solution
- Re Use Materials
- QUALITEL Espace Numérique du Logement
- TrustMark