Barriers and Incentives for Extensive Implementation of Combined Seismic and Energy Efficiency Retrofits

European cities usually consist of old building stock, which often present social, financial and tourist center points of the cities. With regards to sustainability and in accordance with the aim of the European Union to limit soil use, to keep usefulness of existing building stock and to ensure sustainability, the EU invests a lot of effort in promoting energy efficiency and low-carbon emissions. On the other hand, even though large parts of the EU are seismically active regions with questionable seismic resistance of older built environment preventive seismic disaster risk reduction measures are attracting less investments. Additionally, private investors are reluctant to invest in seismic safety of their buildings for a number of reasons. As seismic and energy efficiency retrofits should be implemented together to prevent damage, life and financial losses as well as to reduce costs of works that would otherwise be duplicated, the aim of this paper is to review and discuss barriers which limit the possibility to extensively undertake combined seismic safety and energy efficiency retrofits. Moreover, several incentives used in different countries are presented in the paper that might reduce or eliminate barriers and increase interest of private investors in investing into sustainable development.