A survey of environmental performance enhancementstrategies and building data capturing techniques in theNigerian context

Abstract: The need to improve the performance of Nigeria’s office buildings is due to, energy challenges, increasing population, changing user needs, and climate change. With the expansion ofseveral Nigerian cities, existing buildings constitute a significant portion of the building stock, and improving their environmental performance could be more cost-effective than reconstruction. The use of simulation packages to assess alternative retrofitting enhancement scenarios is a straightforward approach. However, in Nigeria it is often challenging to get appropriate information to facilitatethis type of evaluation; many buildings were not built to their original specifications, and whenavailable, the records are often in a poor state due to deterioration. Studies that aimed at enhancinga building’s performance hardly stated the acquisition of the required building information. Thispaper investigates current practices and future possibilities of improvement measures and datacapturing of existing buildings using a questionnaire survey of 133 building professionals in BeninCity. The inter-relationship between energy efficiency, the environment, and building design with ahigh potential for meaningful retrofit to mitigate energy inefficiencies is known but not fully utilized.The collected thought on current practices signifies the need for developing a more economical andreliable methodology for data capturing and evaluation