Evaluation of different refurbishment or improvement strategies to reduce the environmental impact of University campuses

Over the past few years, urban planners and architects have searched for solutions to improve the performance of urban projects in terms of environmental impact, life quality and socio-economic problems. NEST is an agile and fast tool developed to assess this environmental impact (baseline scenarios and improvements hypotheses) at the district level by a life cycle analysis. The authors of this publication have used NEST in different research projects and have studied different baseline scenarios and evaluated improvement cases. The article presents a summary of the evolution of the research carried out, explaining each case study and the general conclusions obtained. It also presents the current research project focused on the utilisation of renewable energy sources in the campuses in order to reduce their environmental impact.