Building sustainability and earthquake resistance: incorporating a specific criterion in the Italian ITACA Protocol

Recent Italian earthquakes unfortunately showed, once more, the physical vulnerability of existing buildings and the significant outcomes in terms of human losses, economic effects and environmental damages. There is a need to promote more effectively the seismic retrofitting of existing buildings to the legislation in force and to make new and existing buildings more resilient. Moreover, without guarantee for the safety of the people, discussing sustainability of buildings and cities is likely to appear even redundant. Since the total or partial collapses of buildings have important and obvious effects on the environment, society and economy, the authors propose both to enlarge the concept of building sustainability including safety in the event of an earthquake and to use sustainable building assessment as an incentive to improve the earthquake resistance of new and existing buildings. From an operational point of view, the proposal is to incorporate a specific criterion concerning the earthquake resistance in the Italian ITACA Protocol, updating the tool with an assessment not only of energy and environmental sustainability of buildings but also of their resilience. The paper is subdivided into four main sections plus conclusions: after the introduction describing the reasons why the authors consider essential to enlarge building sustainability concept so to include earthquake resistance, the second section reports the Japanese experience of CASBEE (Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency), the only assessment system in the world incorporating the earthquake resistance among its criteria; then, the third section presents both the proposal for introducing the building earthquake resistance performance into the ITACA Protocol in accordance with the UNI/PdR 13:2015 – Sezione 1, following the regulation in force, and a hypothesis of weights redistribution among the different assessment categories in the protocol; the fourth section discusses potential outcomes of the proposal made and traces future developments; finally the conclusions summarise the rationale and the highlights of the work presented.