Tom Jennings, senior consultant at BRE and consortium member for the Innovate UK BuildAudIt project, outlines the importance of addressing data insights for existing buildings and how to drive forward the circular economy ahead of net zero refurbishment
As we near 2025, halfway through the decade expected to mark a global turning point in tackling the climate crisis and charting a course to net zero, many questions still linger across the built environment sector – particularly around existing building stocks.
For the UK alone, these questions concern over 30m residential, public and commercial buildings that all require some form of net zero refurbishment.
There also exists a sizable number of building demolitions – less known for their potential to achieve sustainability – totalling over 50,000 per annum.
Both these processes share the same pitfalls when it comes to enhancing the circularity of their respective processes – a lack of robust data.
Datasets for existing buildings are a combination of disorganised, outdated and even incorrect inputs. While the majority of new buildings have access to a BIM model or digital twin, ensuring sustainability considerations are embedded at each stage of a project, the vast majority of existing buildings do not have this luxury. When they do, it is expensive and time-consuming to create.
Combined expertise for a landmark solution
With no current means to address this, there is a clear need for a tool that can provide an efficient and structured overview of existing buildings to inform approaches to reusing materials in retrofits or new builds.
Bringing together the combined expertise of built environment, artificial intelligence (AI) and academic experts, BuildAudIt has set out on an ambitious year-long journey to develop a proof-of-concept platform to do exactly that.
Using AI, BuildAudIt will be able to combine existing architectural plans and drawings with current auditing technologies including point cloud scanning, visual data capture, natural language capture and other emerging AI technologies such as image recognition.
Beyond the initial project scope of addressing pre-demolition and pre-refurbishment auditing, the platform has the potential for adaptation across all stages of the built environment lifecycle, as well as different types of building surveys, including condition surveys, planned maintenance, sustainability, energy efficiency, fire risk and health & safety.
Turbocharged building data collection
With no other commercial solution currently linking these aspects into one offering, BuildAudIt has the potential to turbocharge the collection of existing building data required for the expansion of building retrofit activities, helping the UK lead the way in addressing global challenges in the built environment.
As one of the consortium members helping to deliver BuildAudIt, BRE has already seen the enormous potential of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to transform the circularity landscape for existing buildings.
Using some of the constituent parts that will coalesce to form BuildAudIt, BRE has conducted pre-refurbishment audit surveys which have delivered a 75% time saving compared with manual surveys.
Given the size of the challenge ahead, a platform that can recognise existing materials and link datapoints in a structured format will deliver significant efficiency and cost savings for organisations wanting to understand their existing building stock.
This has the combined benefit of reducing barriers to entry for those entering or upskilling within the auditing profession – which will be increasingly needed if the UK is to develop workforce capacity to refurbish buildings ahead of net zero.
Change around the corner
There is increasing awareness of the ability of climate change to reduce the lifetime of assets, with maintenance only offering a short-term, expensive route to redress.
Only with data-driven solutions will we see transformational change in the built environment, making the need for a platform like BuildAudIt stronger than ever.
Beyond net zero refurbishment, the importance of surveys and auditing of existing building stock is growing at an increasing pace as the government develops its Warm Homes Plan and as a result of the Building Safety Act 2022.
Measures including these add significant demand to an already burgeoning market and it is crucial that UK policy is backed by robust insight to ensure good outcomes for householders, building owners, local authorities and industry alike.
