Analysing Trends in Sustainable Building Adaptations in the Melbourne CBD

In 2008 the City of Melbourne initiated an office retrofit program, known as the 1200 Buildings Program, to reduce total building related greenhouse gas emissions. On the basis that 87% of buildings we will have in 2050 are already built, retrofit or adaptation is vital to mitigate the impacts of climate change and global warming. It is imperative that city authorities take a lead on promoting and incentivising increased rates of sustainable building adaptation. Following the 2013 and 2011 City of Melbourne 1200 Buildings Melbourne Retrofit Survey, a further analysis of the survey data to ascertain the patterns of retrofit as the city transitions to low carbon was undertaken. Based on earlier studies of 7393 Melbourne office buildings retrofits from 1998 to 2008 (Wilkinson 2011) and 1453 retrofits from 2009 to 2011, this study investigated up to 17 building attributes previously found to be important and to provide further insight into retrofit trends in the Melbourne office market. The overall aim was to analyse office-building retrofits at the city scale reported in the 2013 1200 Buildings Retrofit Survey. Using City of Melbourne 1200 Building Retrofit Survey 2013 data, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was undertaken to explore the building attributes important to office building retrofit. It was possible to include many of the attributes found important in earlier Principal Component Analyses and five key findings emerge from the study. The PCA showed that five typologies accounted for 68% of the retrofits contained in the 2013 Retrofit Survey data. Patterns to the uptake of retrofit are apparent