Even if professionals in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) trades limit embodied carbon in new projects, an estimated two-thirds of the world’s current indoor space will still be in use in 2040. For property owners and developers, retrofitting buildings to become carbon neutral is costly and time-consuming, but it may also be a competitive advantage in attracting conscientious renters and buyers. Luckily, innovative solutions are emerging—including the idea of a “second skin” for existing buildings.

Applying new techniques with a geographic approach will likely speed up their rollout and boost their efficacy as carbon-neutral fixes.

From Scan to Second Skin

A recent Fast Company article highlighted Berlin-based startup ecoworks, which is pioneering a second-skin retrofitting process. The process begins with 3D scans of a building’s facade and interior taken with a handheld device.

This digital twin is sent to a factory, where a highly automated process yields panels that fit over the building like a second skin, with room for windows, pipes, and ventilation shafts. The process of installing the panels, along with a modular roof equipped with solar technology, is said to take just a few weeks.

Throughout the AEC and real estate industries, 3D scans are now commonly incorporated into building information modeling (BIM) software. Many AEC professionals augment BIM images by importing them into a geographic information system (GIS), which reveals how buildings will look within landscapes and streetscapes, as well as how they will interface with infrastructure like sewers and cables.

Beyond these visualisation capabilities, the merger of GIS and BIM delivers operational advantages. Project managers can streamline design and build operations by integrating the technologies, and building managers can analyse and quantify energy efficiency.

Efficiency and Speed

Streamlined project management is the most immediate benefit this technological merger can bring to building retrofits.

Installing a building’s second skin requires coordination among diverse stakeholders, including property owners, factory staff, construction crews, and local building departments. Cloud-based GIS can serve as a common visual meeting ground for a retrofitting project, promoting innovation and fostering collaboration.

For retrofits involving large developments or communities, a GIS-BIM combination enhances progress by integrating authoritative data and generating dynamic colour-coded maps that can be observed at a central office or in the field.

The merger of BIM and GIS could also help planners coordinate building retrofitting with other projects designed to counter the effects of climate change. These might include planting trees to decrease heat islands or finding high-potential sites for solar arrays.

Blocks of Opportunity, with Savings to Quantify

With millions of buildings in use today, planners must identify those best suited to structural retrofitting and second skins.

Experts have suggested that AI could speed up identification of the best candidates, which tend to be blocklike apartment buildings. GeoAI, a hybrid of GIS and AI technologies, could accomplish that by highlighting hundreds—or even thousands—of buildings from aerial photographs. As retrofitting technology improves, machine learning models could be trained to find new candidates.

Once buildings in an area receive the second-skin treatment, the GIS-BIM combo could help quantify decarbonisation efforts, as described in a recent NextTech article.

The calculations would be complex, including an account of emissions avoided through improved insulation and solar energy production. Since the second-skin concept means that most of a building’s facade is retained rather than destroyed, even embodied carbon savings could factor into computations.

As with any solution to the climate change problem, implementing a building’s second skin requires an organised and dedicated effort. A foundation of GIS technology, augmented by BIM and AI, provides the collaboration capabilities and the all-important local context needed to support a critical global effort.

In the face of constricted supply chains, manufacturers and their customers have had to embrace a business cliché: do more with less.

The scarcity of supplies—from cars to baby formula to coffee—has led some businesses to reengineer their supply lines to use fewer sources of raw materials or components. In turn, their customers have had to become more strategic about how they use the products they buy.

For the agricultural industry, one critical ingredient has been increasingly hard to come by. As Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported, supplies of synthetic fertilizer were already stretched thin by rising natural gas prices, factory closures, and export restrictions when Russia, long an exporter of crop nutrients, launched its invasion of Ukraine, stretching supplies even thinner.

For farmers, maximizing the impact of fertilizer may be a challenge best accomplished with maps.

The connected farm is a broader vision of precision agriculture, which has been around for decades. Technology plays a key role—it’s changing how farmers look at a field of corn or the next crop of grapes or a herd of cattle. With new technology and data, growers and ranchers see in a very nuanced way how each location within their operation is performing and adjust proactively.