Critical Overview and Application of Integrated Approaches for Seismic Loss Estimation and Environmental Impact Assessment

Buildings are among the major contributors to environmental impacts, in terms of non-renewable resource depletion, energy and material consumption, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. For this reason, modern societies are pushing towards the refurbishment of existing buildings aiming at the reduction of their operational energy consumption and at a major use of renewable energy and low-carbon materials. At the same time, buildings are expected to provide population with safe living and working conditions, even when hit by different kinds of hazards during their service life, such as earthquakes. Until recently, life cycle assessment (LCA) procedures tended not to include the effects of natural hazards. However, if considered in a building LCA, earthquake-induced environmental impacts would constitute a very informative performance metric to decision-makers, in addition to the more customarily used monetary losses or downtime indicators. Within this context, therefore, a comprehensive review of the existing literature is presented, with comparisons between available methodologies being carried out in terms of their employed seismic loss estimation method, environmental impact assessment procedure, damage-to-impact conversion, impact-to-cost conversion, and selected decision variable. Further, an illustrative case-study application is also included.