Digital Interoperability for Building Renovation Passports: Supporting Sustainable Building Renovation and Decarbonisation

Building Renovation Passports (BRPs) are increasingly recognised in the European Union (EU) as strategic instruments for planning and monitoring deep renovation. Yet, their effectiveness depends on interoperability with the wider ecosystem of digital tools used across the building lifecycle. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this review searched ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Google Scholar for peer-reviewed studies (2020–2026) on BRP interoperability with Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), Digital Building Logbooks (DBLs), Building Information Modelling (BIM), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Digital Twins (DTs), and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools, screening 651 records to a final sample of 49 studies, complemented by a comparative analysis of 19 EU-funded projects and schemes. Results show that BRP–EPC–DBL co-occurrence is the most consolidated pattern across the initiatives reviewed. In contrast, GIS, BIM, IoT, Smart Readiness Indicator, LCA, and Digital Twin components are each explicitly addressed in fewer than a third of the initiatives reviewed. Mapping data standards (IFC, CityGML, ETIM, ISO 22057) show an uneven gap: shallower for BIM and LCA, where standards exist, and deeper for EPCs and DBLs, which lack unified EU schemas, and for GIS, where semantic and scale alignment with building-level BRP data remains weak. The BIM–LCA–BRP link, though feasible, remains experimental, rarely reconciling predicted and monitored carbon or linking BIM quantities to Environmental Product Declarations in machine-readable form. Closing these gaps requires technical standards, semantic consistency, and governance mechanisms capable of sustaining continuous data exchange, positioning interoperability as a priority for the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD, the EU legislative framework for improving building energy performance), the Renovation Wave (the EU strategy for accelerating and scaling up building renovation), and future digital building initiatives.