Towards a life cycle sustainability assessment method for the quantification and reduction of impacts of buildings life cycle

The construction and building sectorsare one of the highestconsumersof resourcesand energy. Literature evidences the potentialities of the design phase towardsthe improvement of environmental, economic and social performance of buildings. Thus, the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) approach is recognized as suitable method. It isbased on the “triple bottom line”principle, to calculate environmental, economic, social impacts produced by buildings during itslife cycle. The present paper aims to present a methodological framework based on anLCSA, used during design stages of buildings and integrated into a building’s design technology such as Building Information Modeling (BIM). A conceptual approach to conduct the data integration and a possible workflow to integrate the LCSA into BIMis proposed. The value of the present approach is the possibility to conductquantitative environmental, economic and social assessment of buildings to guide designers to measure and predict the building’s performanc

An Exploratory Modelling Study on Late Pleistocene Mega-Tsunamis Triggered by Giant Submarine Landslides in the Mediterranean

Gigantic submarine landslides are among the most energetic events on the Earth surface. During the Late Pleistocene the Mediterranean Sea was the scenario of a 9 number of such events, some of whose geological fi ngerprints are the 500 km3 mass transport deposit SL2 at the Nile delta fan (dated at ca. 110 ka BP) and the Herodotus Basing Megaturbidite (HBM, a 400 km3 deposit dated at ca. 27.1 ka BP). This paper presents an exploratory study on the tsunamigenic potential of these slides by using a numerical model based on the 2D depth-averaged non-linear barotropic shallow water equations. The sliding mass is modelled both as a rigid block with a prescribed motion and as a viscous fl ow layer. The 26 km3 debris fl ow BIG’95 scenario (at the Ebro continental slope, 11.5 ka BP) served for model com-parison against independent modelling works. Based upon the available geologicalstudies, several source scenarios have been modelled. Our results show that the generated tsunamis would have had up to hundred fold the peak energy of some extreme historical ones, such as the 1755 Lisbon tsunami. Thus, the HBM tsunami could have reached peak energies over one hundred Megatons, producing runups over 50 m height along some 1300 km2 of shoreline in the eastern Mediterranean. The study also comprises their propagation pattern, their impacts along the former shoreline and their energy partitioning. The highest tsunami energies were associated to thick landslides at shallow depths, with high slope angles and within a gulf geometry