BETTER POLICY Building Environmental Tools To Empower Responsive Policies Outreaching LIfeCYcle. Guide lines and protocols to enable Public Administrations-driven processes in the Italian construction sector.

The adoption of criteria, methods and metrics for assessing the sustainability of buildings in a Life Cycle (LC) perspective, i.e. by adopting the Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) approach and the related Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, is internationally recognized as necessary to define effective ecological transition actions, estimate their effects and monitor results (EC, COM (2019) 640, "The European Green Deal"). Over the last twenty years, such methodologies, and in particular LCA, have been gradually introduced into corporate environment, while the integrations in the institutional sphere and by public bodies have been significantly less numerous and more episodic. Thus, their integration into the EC policy framework and within Public Administrations of the Member States (PAs) still seems too marginal, despite the EU Commission frequently recalls these methodologies as necessary and effective measures to meet the 2030 and 2050 targets. In Italy, many PAs at multiple levels (national, regional, municipal) have enforced environmental action plans and adopted policies in favour of both sustainability and efficient use of resources, including further requirements, protocols and indicators to implement their application. However, the assessment of the environmental effectiveness of these measures is not performed through a systemic LC approach, but often considering each environmental matrix alone (energy, water, waste, air) as separate phases of the building process (e.g. energy efficiency and decarbonisation of buildings use phase, C&D waste management). This implies high risks of over or underestimation of impacts assigned to individual environmental matrices or single phases, compared to real contribution they bring to the overall environmental balance. A holistic approach embracing the entire life cycle of the processes to manage is needed to comply ecological transition challenges. This can only be effective if embedded in the policies targeting the construction sector, thus firstly adopted by PAs. It can provide them, indeed, an excellent means to drive the territorial development by properly accounting the combined effects of their decisions on the various environmental matrices, making available more reliably assessment of intervention's costs-benefits ratios, and stimulating the adoption of coherent approaches by all the supply chain Players. The research program addresses to enhance the policy effectiveness of Italian PAs regarding the built environment sustainability, through the implementation of environmental criteria, assessment-verification-monitoring procedures and reference targets, based on LCA methods. The fast spreading within the Italian PAs of sustainability assessment methods aligned with international standards bring national relevance to the present research program, as gaps in assessment may seriously hinder in providing evidences about the compliance and effectiveness of the actions.