Issues in Compliance with Low-Carbon Requirements in the Australian Residential Building Industry

EasyChair Preprint 9635

Abstract

Low-carbon requirements have long been acknowledged as critical instruments to facilitate residential building industry’s transition toward decarbonization in Australia. However, recent studies in the residential building sector have shown that compliance with low-carbon requirements is under-researched, which has led to a significant divergence between low-carbon requirements’ intentions and actual performance. Therefore, based on the methodology of literature review, the paper aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of issues in compliance with low-carbon requirements within the Australian residential building industry. Through reviewing research works and policy documents, the paper firstly demonstrates the Australian developments in promoting low-carbon residential buildings, by summarizing key low-carbon requirements and their corresponding purposes. This highlights the significance of these requirements in spurring emission reduction from residential buildings. Subsequently, relying on regulatory studies concerning the NCC energy efficiency provisions, the paper reveals the wide presence of non/under-compliance challenges across every construction stage. It further indicates that such issues are largely attributed to major stakeholder groups including regulators (policy makers, building control officers), regulated building practitioners and occupants. Finally, the paper identifies research gaps and proposes future works in the areas of enhancing enforcement regimes, design of the energy simulation tool, raising occupants’ awareness and investigating building practitioners’ compliance behaviour. The paper implies the urgency to investigate the suboptimal compliance phenomena in the Australian residential building industry, as these issues have already impeded the achievement of the industry’s low-carbon future. It also brings contributions via enlightening future research areas to address the issues.

Keyphrases: Compliance, building practitioner, energy efficiency, low carbon, residential building industry

@booklet{EasyChair:9635,
  author    = {Yi Lu and Gayani Karunasena and Chunlu Liu},
  title     = {Issues in Compliance with Low-Carbon Requirements in the Australian Residential Building Industry},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9635},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2023}}