Eight out of ten buildings in Europe were constructed before 1990.

These buildings are structurally weaker, consume lots of energy

and are at greater risk of seismic losses as requirements were lower some decades ago.

National authorities find it hard to develop plans to renovate buildings on such a scale.

The task requires a huge amount of information and technical knowledge.

Could we help them choose the best strengthening technologies

for their specific types of buildings?

Could we support them also by involving engineers, architects and construction companies?

We provide technical guidelines to help them do this large-scale planning,

all backed by data and impact evaluation tools they can directly use.

We started by producing a set of technical guidelines.

We chose regions in Europe where renovating would make the biggest impact,

whether because their buildings were older or because the seismic risk was high, and often both.

We then created a web platform to attract the interest of national authorities

and disseminate these guidelines.

As information is key,

we share evaluations of the efficiency of different technologies,

their cost and a measure of their impact during the entire life cycle.

We have even developed a methodology to assess the multiple cumulative benefits of strengthening buildings

This can be used to estimate the economic gains of lowering energy bills and of reducing seismic losses.

We analyzed 105 million buildings in the European Union.

We identified the top 20 priority regions where almost 12 million people live.

Our recommendations can now directly feed into renovation plans

that could benefit millions of Europeans.

We are a team of European Commission scientists and experts from across Europe

who work together on the integrated seismic and energy renovation of buildings