Does seismic risk affect the environmental impact of existing buildings?

• Procedure to consider embodied carbon and energy related to seismic influence.
• Comparison between operational carbon and embodied carbon due to seismic risk.
• Embodied carbon associated to earthquake damage is included.
• A case study shows the importance of including environmental impact of earthquakes.
• Sole energy retrofit does not reduce environmental sustainability in seismic areas.

The building sector significantly impacts on the environment during every stage of the building life cycle. The necessary transition toward a carbon-neutral society is driving a growing attention toward the refurbishment of old buildings, fostering intervention measures with the twofold objective of reducing operational energy consumption, typically upgrading the thermal insulation, and ensuring the quality of the consumed energy by adopting renewable and sustainable energy in the supply chain, such as thermal and photovoltaic solar energy.In seismic prone areas the vulnerability of existing buildings, not designed according to modern building codes, could hamper the efficiency of the solely energy refurbishment, besides representing a safety hazard. The present paper investigates a framework to quantify the influence of seismic events on the environmental impact assessment of buildings.The investigated framework is applied to a selected building, considering the building as alternatively located in regions with different seismicity. As an example, the building environmental impact is evaluated, in terms of carbon footprint, in the case of two different scenarios: upon completion of an energy refurbishment only, and after a coupled intervention targeting energy refurbishment and seismic retrofit. The results show that, in case of energy refurbishment only, the building located in a high-seismicity region presents an expected additional annual embodied equivalent carbon dioxide due to seismic risk, which almost equals the annual operational carbon dioxide after thermal refurbishment.