THE4BEES

THE4BEES builds on the hypothesis: Energy is consumed by people rather than by buildings. Although most of the strategies to achieve energy efficiency in buildings focus on technical mitigation measures, to reach the ambitious goals on Low Carbon set by EU and Alpine Strategy (EUSALP), both structural and soft approaches shall be considered complementarily across the Alpine Space.

THE4BEES focuses on the behavioural changes of users in public buildings needed to achieve reduction of energy consumption. Such changes will be originated by the use of innovative ICT applications developed by a transnational ecosystem. Those applications will be used by the target groups in the demonstration sites (schools, houses, factories) to encourage behavioural changes for energy efficiency and carbon footprint reduction.

The project generated three main outputs: i) Strategies and methodologies for users engagement through co-creation activities; ii) Models and recommendations for improvement of policies; iii) Sensing networks and IT applications, including specifications, hardware and software.

The participatory process used in achieving the results represents as well the interesting part of the project. Amongst the different pubblications of the project, three of them are particularly interesting: “Improvement of existing low carbon and spatial development policies on the basis of outcome of co-creation labs and pilots”; “Report on result analysis (Evaluation of results by means of reports from the CCLabs and the dashboard)”; “Models and Recommendations for improvement of policies”.

THE4BEES project delivered social science research and social “experiments” like the CCLabs building the evidence base for behavioural and institutional strategies aimed at saving energy.