Retail stores are amongst the building typologies with the highest carbon (CI) and energy intensities (EI). However, previous studies have only explored best practice EI of food and non-food retailers, without identifying best practice CI threshold values. This paper presents a five-step analysis of CI and EI amongst the highest revenue retailers, benchmarking best and worst performing CI and EI retailers, analysing their nationality, performing a content analysis on their CSR reports and comparing results in terms of differentiation policies, strategies and building practices that can lead to increased environmental performance. Combined CI and EI best practice threshold values were found simultaneously under 346 kWh/m²/y and 115 kg CO₂eq/m²/y for food retailers and under 146 kWh/m²/y and 70 kg CO₂eq/m²/y for non-food retailers. In terms of policy, best-performing retailers shared a strong top-down management commitment towards sustainability across all business areas (p = 0.04) and an increased use of referential reporting standards, particularly of GRI standards (p = 0.05) and of the GHG protocol (p = 0.01). In terms of strategy, they established ambitious energy goals, such becoming 100% supplied by renewable energy (p = 0.05) or carbon neutral by 2020. As for building practice, LED and photovoltaic technology were the most popular high-performance solutions, but only the use of natural refrigerants (p = 0.001) and gas transfer to CO₂ (p = 0.0007) were related to best-performing practice. The variability of CI and EI found in this study shows that it is already possible to reduce the retail sector’s contribution to global GHG emissions considerably. The proposed best practice CI and EI reference levels, linked to corporate policy, strategy and building practice, are useful new tools for retail energy-management, which can further promote sustainability in retail buildings, thus allowing a deeper understanding of how to decarbonize the retail building sector.

中文翻译：

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将最佳零售商的碳和能源强度与政策，策略和建筑实践联系起来

零售店是碳（CI）和能源强度（EI）最高的建筑类型之一。但是，以前的研究仅探讨了食品和非食品零售商的最佳实践EI，而没有确定最佳实践CI阈值。本文对收入最高的零售商中的CI和EI进行了五步分析，对表现最佳和最差的CI和EI零售商进行了基准分析，分析了其国籍，对其CSR报告进行了内容分析，并根据差异化政策，策略比较了结果以及可以提高环境绩效的建筑实践。同时在346 kWh / m ² / y和115 kg CO ₂ eq / m ^2的情况下同时发现了CI和EI最佳实践的组合阈值/ y对于食品零售商来说是146 kWh / m ² / y，对于非食品零售商来说是70 kg CO ₂ eq / m ² / y。在政策方面，表现最好的零售商对所有业务领域的可持续性有着强烈的自上而下的管理承诺（p  = 0.04），并更多地使用了参考报告标准，尤其是GRI标准（p  = 0.05）和GHG协议（p  = 0.01）。在战略方面，他们制定了雄心勃勃的能源目标，例如100％由可再生能源提供（p =到2020年达到碳中和（0.05）。就建筑实践而言，LED和光伏技术是最受欢迎的高性能解决方案，但仅使用天然制冷剂（p  = 0.001）和将气体转移到CO ₂（p  = 0.0007）与表现最佳的做法有关。在这项研究中发现的CI和EI的可变性表明，已经有可能大大降低零售业对全球温室气体排放的贡献。建议的最佳实践CI和EI参考水平与公司政策，策略和建筑实践相关，是零售能源管理的有用新工具，可以进一步促进零售建筑的可持续性，从而使人们对如何使零售业脱碳有更深入的了解。建筑部门。