Energy Efficiency in Sustainable Buildings: A Systematic Review with Taxonomy, Challenges, Motivations, Methodological Aspects, Recommendations, and Pathways for Future Research

In recent years, increasing interest has been shown in targeting energy efficiency as a roadmap for carbon mitigation, limiting energy use, improving buildings’ energy performance, and reducing energy consumption for achieving sustainable buildings. This article presents a systematic review to provide the best practices in this area and identify the challenges, motivations, recommendations, and pathways for future work. Discussing the methodological aspects gives insights for future researchers. This research used papers published on three scientific and reliable databases—Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and IEEE Xplore-from 2014 to May 23, 2021. The selected papers reached N = 134 based on inclusion and exclusion criteria and divided into review papers, proceeding conference, and articles. The review articles (N = 16/134) give an overall view on improving energy efficiency to achieve sustainability in buildings by using green building rating systems, developing and implementing policies, technology utilization, adopting techniques, and applying strategies. The conferences (N = 33/134) and articles (N = 85/134) focus more on details of different aspects of improving energy efficiency by reducing environmental, economic, social, and other impacts. A few articles proposed multiple-criteria decision-making methods to solve energy efficiency gaps for promoting sustainability in buildings. Achieving energy efficiency toward sustainable buildings is a hot topic in the sustainable development area. The outcomes from this paper will provide a valuable reference to stakeholders, governments, and decision-makers and give suggestions from the selected past studies. This review will provide motivation and attract future research endeavors in the field. ●Map the research landscape of energy efficiency in sustainable buildings into a coherent taxonomy.●Determine the motivations of using energy efficiency in sustainable and green buildings.●Highlight the main challenges that hinder the achievement of sustainable buildings by targeting energy efficiency.●List recommendations to improve the acceptance of used energy efficiency in sustainable and green building's profile in the literature.●Present pathways for future research as guidelines for future researchers to explore more about sustainable and green buildings by targeting high energy efficiency.●Determine the methodological aspects for limitation of previous studies.