The environmental footprint of buildings at city level: a new assessment tool

The article describes a new tool developed to evaluate the environmental profile of the energy systems installed in buildings of the city of Milan and the environmental profiles of the buildings themselves, concerning the operational stage. The authors developed the tool to support the city with a useful instrument able to provide benchmarks and to test the solutions proposed for the decarbonization of Milan, in compliance with the National and European 2050 targets. The authors adopted the attributional life cycle approach and the method EF 3.0, created by the Joint Research Centre – European Commission, for impact category evaluation to develop the tool. To test the potential, the environmental profile of the city is shown in this article, starting from the data provided by the energy performance certificates registered in the buildings’ energy cadastre of the Lombardy region.