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The potential to reduce energy consumption in buildings is high. The design phase of the building is very important. In addition, it is vital to understand how to measure the energy efficiency in the building operation phase in order to encourage the right efficiency efforts. In understanding the building energy efficiency, it is important to comprehend the interplay of building occupancy, space efficiency, and energy efficiency. Recent studies found in the literature concerning energy efficiency in office buildings have concentrated heavily on the technical characteristics of the buildings or technical systems. The most commonly used engineering indicator for building energy efficiency is the specific energy consumption (SEC), commonly measured in kWh/m2 per annum. While the SEC is a sound way to measure the technical properties of a building and to guide its design, it obviously omits the issues of building occupancy and space efficiency. This paper studies existing energy efficiency indicators and introduces a new indicator for building energy efficiency which takes into account both space and occupancy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multidimensional crisis phenomena (financial–economic, environmental and social), plaguing the international community, especially in the last 30 years, have intensified resentment towards traditional models of growth and socio-economic development. The European Commission has placed the idea of a green economy (GE) at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy. This paper presents an assessment of the implementation of the green economy assumptions in EU countries in 2018, taking 2010 as the base year. Using taxonomic methods, a synthetic evaluation index (GEI—Green Economy Index) was constructed based on a multi-criterion set of 27 indicators. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: How green are the European economies? What are the main challenges in this context? The average value of the index for the EU countries decreased in the studied years from 0.3423 to 0.3294, which can be interpreted as a slowdown in the greening processes. The key recommendations for the upcoming years include the improvement of energy efficiency indicators, the further increase in the share of renewable energy sources in the energy balance. Moreover, a significant problem continues to be the high percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion, as well as low CO2 and resource productivity rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for clean energy is a key global issue requiring global ideas to be implemented through local action. This is particularly important in Poland's energy transition, since the country produces energy mainly from conventional sources, i.e., coal, gas, and crude oil. Adverse climate change caused by high emissions of the economy based on the combustion of hydrocarbons as well as the growing public awareness have made it necessary to look for new environmentally friendly energy sources. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the use of alternative energy sources, biomass in particular, is compatible with sustainable development policy. Eight indicators for the EU-28 and for Poland were analysed in order to verify the progress in modifying the energy mix between 2010 and 2018 in the context of implementing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The analysis showed that both in the EU-28 and in Poland, the aggregated indicator taking into account the positive and negative change in the values of individual indicators improved between 2010 and 2018. In the EU-28, this indicator is higher (180.1) than in Poland (152.3). The lower value for Poland is mainly due to the fact that the main source of energy in Poland remains hard coal and lignite. However, the noticeable increase in recent years in the share of energy from renewable sources, biomass included, allows us to look with hope to a rapidly growing indicator measuring progress towards a sustainable development goal, and to improving environmental standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN's 2030 Agenda defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In order to ensure the implementation of this global agenda, the UN proposed a systematic follow-up and review through indicator-based tracking and reporting of the progress with statistical and geospatial information toward SDGs at national, regional, and global levels. This has posed many technical and institutional challenges. Although international communities have devoted great attention to this hot topic, most of their work has focused on the conceptual design and preliminary testing. There are very few good practices for a comprehensive measurement and assessment of progress toward SDGs with the integration of statistical and geospatial information at national or local levels. This paper presents the methodology and results of a pioneer project which measured the progress toward SDGs at a local level in China (i.e., Deqing County) by integrating statistical and geospatial information. In this study, a number of technical/institutional issues have been tackled, such as the adoption of appropriate indicators at a local level, availability and acquisition of reliable data sets, and spatiotemporal analysis with a geographical perspective, interaction between SDGs and cross-sector coordination. The major conclusions are (a) the comprehensive progress toward SDGs in Deqing can be most appropriately measured and assessed by integrating geospatial and statistical information; (b) Deqing has made significant economic and social advances while maintaining a good ecological environment over the past few years. The results were released at the first United Nations World Geospatial Information Congress as a good practice and a live example to stimulate discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]