Status and Risk Assessment as Decision Support for Energy Efficiency Measures in Historical Buildings; Testing and Development of the ‘3B’ Method

Abstract: Within the Swedish research and development programme on energy efficiency in historic buildings, one project is developing a transdisciplinary method for assessing building status and intervention risks as a means of providing decision support for the selection of measures. The method, here tentatively referred to as the ‘3B’ method, fuses the disciplines of Building conservation, Building physics and Building biology into a holistic approach. Through action research, this thesis has investigated the continued development of the method with the help of workshops and testing on three different case studies. The workshops generated insights on what is required for the method to be well-functioning and successfully reproduced by other practitioners. Some key areas that surfaced were: how to best employ the developed checklists for status assessment, how to perform high quality risk assessments, how to express the certainty level of assessments, how to develop decision support material that is easy to understand and use, how to manage current problems regarding ‘specialists’ within the field, and how to address knowledge gaps. The case studies revealed that the inherent properties of the buildings assessed, combined with the wishes of the property owner or decision maker, as well as the timing of the assessments, constitute distinct limitations that will largely determine which measures are feasible. Furthermore, the testing confirmed and emphasized the value of thorough on-site examination performed by multiple disciplines at once; not only is it unparalleled in terms of getting a holistic grasp on building status, but it also promotes a systemic understanding of the building that is crucial to risk assessment. Overall, the pronounced transdisciplinarity was deemed to be the method’s greatest strength. Although further development is needed before the method can reach implementation on a larger scale, the outcomes of this testing and development round are constructive and promising enough to suggest that this may be attainable in the future.