Sustainable MED Cities
Energy efficiency improvement is a key strategy to reduce the environmental impact of public buildings. But usually energy efficiency plans do not fully exploit the potential for synergies that groups of buildings might offer. Energy efficient measures and their implementation at neighbourhood level (i.e. district heating, PV installations, etc) are showing clearly that a building scale approach is not optimal in reaching significant and cost-effective improvements. However at neighbourhood scale, decision making processes and the design of the intervention are more complex. Many EU projects addressed this issue proposing different methodologies, tools and indicators. CESBA MED intends to test 10 of them and to select the most affordable and operational solutions. On the base of the test results' evaluation, a common sustainability assessment framework at urban scale, a set of 8 regional assessment tools (CESBA MED SNTool) and an innovative decision making process will be defined to support the development of energy efficiency plans for public buildings in the context of their surrounding neighbourhoods. CESBA SNTool will allow to produce the MED Passport to compare the performances of buildings and neighbourhoods, in line with the EC COM 2014 445. A CESBA MED network of cities will be set up to maximise results' transferability. Training courses and workshops will be organized in the MED area. The project will be part of the European CESBA initiative.