Open Collections

Rana, Anber

University of British Columbia

Green buildings (GBs) are considered to be a more cost-effective and viable solution than transport and other industry sectors to attain carbon mitigation targets. To promote the large-scale adaptation of GBs, one of the key “on-ground efforts” from the government include the development of appropriate financial incentives (FIs). Keeping in view the diverse scope and scale of FIs, an evaluation of FIs is critically important to increase the rate of construction of GBs and to meet desired mitigation targets. The evaluation of FIs involves consideration of the complex nature of building, stakeholders’ perspectives and spatio-temporal design and economic parameters that are rarely considered in conventional studies. Hence, there is a need for pragmatic decision-making that will help in making FIs planning that is beneficial to all stakeholders. In order to address, this need, the main objective of this research is to develop a decision support framework that can evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of FIs available for GBs in Canada. This objective was achieved in five distinct steps. First, the research reviewed the existing status of FIs in Canada and the techniques used to evaluate FIs, which helped to identify knowledge gaps and specific research requirements in this area. The second step determined the impact of occupancy profiles of residential buildings on estimating viable energy-saving measures. The third step investigated the effectiveness of available FIs for a range of design and economic parameters. The fourth step evaluated the efficiency of available FIs for single buildings and neighborhoods from private and government perspectives. The last step investigated the environmental impacts of operation strategies of a public building and trade-offs between human health and their implication on eligible FIs. The framework presents realistic impacts of the variability in occupancy, operation, building archetypes, stakeholders perspectives, location and economic parameters on the effectiveness and efficiency of incentive policies. The results obtained have the potential to be used by investors and policymakers to increase GBs and achieve sustainable neighborhoods by providing an evaluation method. The policy recommendations can help design and allocate FIs to areas that will yield the largest benefits for all stakeholders.

Text

2021-08-16

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/79304

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/