Med-EcoSuRe

Med-EcoSuRe (Mediterranean University as Catalyst for Eco-Sustainable Renovation) is a project funded by the European Union, under the ENI CBC MED programme.

The programme is managed by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia (Italy) and aims to promote cross-border cooperation in the Mediterranean region.

Project's Webpage

Project in numbers

Start date: 1st of September 2019
Duration: three years
Total project Budget: 2.934.856, 69 €
EU Contribution: 2.641.371, 02 € (90 %)

Goals

Value and implement innovative and eco-sustainable energy renovation solutions for Mediterranean higher education institutions and introduce active collaborating approach for decision support.
Develop and transfer knowledge on the design and implementation of energy high-performance renovations within higher education institutions.
Initiate a living lab for the collaboration between academics, decision-makers and stakeholders, for the implementation of sustainable energy measures within higher education buildings.

Low energy educational buildings are becoming the standard for new buildings in European and Mediterranean partner countries. Technical solutions are continuously proposed by universities for eco-sustainable building renovation, but there is still a gap between designed models and real world application. This is due to several barriers, such the insufficient collaboration between involved actors aimed at stimulating cost-effective renovations, and the inefficient suitable tools for public sector to achieve the developed solutions.

Med-EcoSuRe project brings together researchers and stakeholders to build a common understanding of the eco-sustainable building renovation issues. It starts by the university’s immediate neighborhood, which is the university building. The project offers an innovative approach to the definition and diffusion of cost-effective energy renovation within university buildings in a short term, with a perspective of the larger scale of public buildings in the long term. This approach consists in the implementation of a Living Laboratory, that yields enough accurate data concerning the existing building stock for properly monitoring the impact of implemented measures, as well as for shaping the right investment and policy framework.

The cross-border Living Lab (LL) comes up with the notion of working with stakeholders to produce research towards innovative solutions. Its key concept is to turn university managers in building management offices, from being traditionally considered as merely “passive technical or administrative” subjects to whom new approaches and solutions are simply proposed, into active players contributing to the co-creation and experimentation of emerging ideas, breakthrough scenarios and innovative concepts.

This Living Lab will propose energy renovation solutions to buildings’ managers based on decision-support tools. The involved academics will not only produce scientific solutions adapted to real situations, but also will monitor and scale-up induced improvements.