Towards Nearly Zero Energy and Environmentally Sustainable Agritourisms: The Eectiveness of the Application of the European Ecolabel Brand

Tourism represents an important economic driver in Italy, being responsible forapproximately 13.2% of the total GDP (a value higher than the reference European average) and fornearly 10% of the regional GDP. Among the touristic sectors, the agritourist ones show a persistentgrowth, experiencing in 2019 a 6.7 point percentage improvement compared to the 2017 figures. Giventhis situation, the transition towards a low-carbon path, aecting the building sector for some time,should also involve agritourist buildings, through the release of EU directives, member state laws, andtechnical rules. On the other hand, agritourism sites could be awarded the Community EU Ecolabel.Unfortunately, awarding theEUenvironmental excellence brand implies the availability of several dataon building energy behavior that should then be managed by complex evaluation tools. To overcomethis issue, the use of the simplified ARERA (Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy Networks andEnvironment) technical datasheets, issued to assess environmental improvements consequent toenergy eciency interventions in the urban residential building stock, is proposed. The applicationof this tool totally avoids using building computer-based simulation models, thus facilitating thepreparation of the EU Ecolabel request documentation by agritourism owners. Being awarded theCommunity EU Ecolabel also implies approaching a net zero energy condition because of a lowerenergy consumption and a minor recourse to fossil fuels. For this purpose, an application of an easygraphical method, previously developed for residential and commercial buildings, which visuallyrepresents improvements achievable by a given agritourism when implementing energy eciencymeasures, is presented.