Transitioning to Green Architecture: Integrating Risk Network Modelling for Green Building Retrofitting

As part of the growing emphasis on sustainability approaches to address mounting pressure on infrastructure systems, energy demand, and carbon emissions, green retrofitting has emerged as a key framework for environmental stewardship.  However, this transition is hindered by fragmented design, the absence of context-specific risk frameworks, performance uncertainties, and complex collaborative stakeholder structures.  Green retrofit projects encounter independent and complex financial, technical, regulatory, and operational risk nodes. These risks arise from specialized expertise requirements, certification processes, increased project costs, a lack of skilled professionals, and limited knowledge frameworks. Traditional risk assessment methodologies often treat risks as isolated events rather than interconnected phenomena, failing to adequately capture the complex relationships and interdependencies among technical, organisational, and regulatory factors in construction projects. To bridge the gap, an Integrative Risk Network Model and Design Science research framework is proposed for green retrofitting projects. To examine performance-based risks associated with transitioning from conventional buildings to green retrofits, 120 peer-reviewed articles and books published within the last five years were searched and analysed to identify key themes, including green architecture, retrofitting, design science methodology, network-based risk modelling, risk node identification, dependencies, and optimization within an integrative framework. The findings indicate that stakeholder misalignment, capital deficiency, and regulatory compliance bottlenecks act as primary nodes and causal drivers that escalate subsequent technical failures stemming from hidden structural defects and performance gaps. Thus, prioritizing these risk nodes, the proposed Integrative Risk Model through Design Science offers an iterative, robust approach to green retrofitting, and network-based risk modelling offers a viable pathway for analysing relationships among multiple risk factors and understanding how these interactions influence project performance. By depicting risks as interconnected nodes in a network, risk network models enable the identification of critical risk pathways and systemic vulnerabilities in project systems.