Address-Specific Sustainable Accommodation Choice Through Real-World Data Integration

TL;DR

This paper introduces EcoGrade, a data-driven, address-specific metric for sustainable accommodation choice, integrated into a decision support system to promote energy-efficient rentals and improve consumer sustainability options.

Contribution

The paper presents EcoGrade, a novel, address-specific sustainability metric that integrates government data and is validated on UK addresses, enabling more precise sustainable accommodation choices.

Findings

EcoGrade accurately matches real-world data with significant statistical validation.

Embedded in a decision support system, EcoGrade received positive user feedback over several months.

The system has the potential to influence rental sector energy efficiency improvements.

Abstract

Consumers wish to choose sustainable accommodation for their travels, and in the case of corporations, may be required to do so. Yet accommodation marketplaces provide no meaningful capability for sustainable choice: typically CO2 estimates are provided that are identical for all accommodation of the same type across an entire country. We propose a decision support system that enables real choice of sustainable accommodation. We develop a data-driven address-specific metric called EcoGrade, which integrates government approved datasets and uses interpolation where data is sparse. We validate the metric on 10,000 UK addresses in 10 cities, showing the match of our interpolations to reality is statistically significant. We show how the metric has been embedded into a decision support system for a global accommodation marketplace and tested by real users over several months with positive user feedback. In the EU, forty percent of final energy consumption is from buildings. We need to encourage all building owners to make their accommodation more efficient. The rental sector is one area where change can occur rapidly, as rented accommodation is renovated frequently. We anticipate our decision support system using EcoGrade will encourage this positive change.