SAI: Supporting Equitable Building Decarbonization

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Reducing carbon emissions from homes is essential for meeting U.S. climate targets. It can also play a critical role in reducing social inequalities. Residential buildings are responsible for 21% of energy use in the U.S., and this resource use places greater burdens on residents in underserved communities who often live in less efficient housing and spend a higher proportion of their income on utility bills.

Retrofitting residential buildings to simultaneously reduce energy use, lower carbon emissions, and address energy inequality is not only an engineering task but also a social challenge. However, most current research on building decarbonization focuses on technological solutions and does not center the perspectives and experiences of impacted communities.

This SAI research project meets this need by establishing a community-engaged process and integrated modeling platform to help residents in underserved communities identify, plan, and implement decarbonization retrofits. By bringing together an interdisciplinary research team in partnership with the local community, this project democratizes scientific data for community needs and aims to advance public awareness and agency around building decarbonization.

Decarbonization retrofits are typically evaluated using building energy models. These models provide a wealth of information that is used mainly by building designers, but this information also has enormous potential value to the public. This project integrates community-engaged, participatory research methods from psychology with building energy modeling tools from engineering to support equitable decarbonization.

A core component of this project is its demonstration testbed, which engages residents in single-family homes currently under renovation in Cincinnati, Ohio as primary stakeholders and co-development partners. The psychosocial and technical needs for and barriers to building decarbonization in underserved communities are first identified and jointly contextualized through surveys, focus groups, and building energy audits.

An innovative building energy modeling platform is developed in collaboration with the community to predict household carbon emissions and to understand retrofit costs and benefits. This modeling platform is then used in community workshops to examine how it can enhance local agency, decision-making, and action around decarbonization. A key outcome of this project is its replicable model for engaging the public with scientific models and data, which can be used to aid community-driven decarbonization planning in other locations.

This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences, the Directorate for Engineering, and the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.