Actions to boost Energy Efficiency and Indoor Air Quality. Case studies in Italian schools

Indoor air quality in schools has always been receiving particular attention. This is not only due to the health emergency ongoing all over the world. In fact, the last EU directive on energy performance of buildings has recognized the relevance of the matter. In 2009 the World Health Organization guidelines highlighted that better performing buildings should provide higher comfort levels and well being for their occupants in addition to improve health. However, also the behaviour of buildings’ occupants is crucial. From this perspective, ENEA, Italian National Agency for new Technologies, Energy and Economic Sustainable Development, has been carried out a series of actions in order to promote both energy savings and the need and usefulness of achieving ever higher levels of air quality in shared environments. The experimental awareness campaign we present was carried on in several schools. It focused on an active involvement of students, especially in terms of direct and collective processing and interpreting the results (data) recorded through the aid of an ad hoc instrumentation provided, thus allowing the participants to visualize the outputs of their behaviour. Starting from the idea of a practical sharing of these actions, hopefully new habits and robust pro-environmental knowledge will be acquired, replicated and disseminated over time even outside school; thus establishing a sort of virality, a beneficial “wildfire” contagion of the project experience towards other contexts and subjects. The possibility by the students to become a sort of “multiplier subjects”, is therefore, in this case as in other Behaviour Change projects, one of the aims of the implemented initiative.