Existing housing stock and climate change – your views?

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The government has launched an inquiry into dealing with the existing hosuing stock and its contribution to climate change. (The UK’s domestic building stock is responsible for around a quarter of all carbon emissions in the UK)

It will be considering the extent to which current measures to adapt existing housing, whether owner occupied, rented privately or social, have been successful and how improvements might be achieved.   Evidence is invited from interested individuals and organisations on a range of topics, including:

  • The significance of existing housing compared to new build and the different levels of performance each display
  • The respective roles of residents, homeowners, landlords, local government, central government and the energy industry in promoting and delivering greater energy efficiency
  • Energy performance certificates
  • The provision of information for households and prospective house buyers, including energy performance certificates
  • Government efforts to reduce carbon emissions from existing housing stock whether in private or public ownership and other related programmes including Decent Homes
  • The technologies available to reduce emissions and the Government’s role in facilitating relevant further technological development
  • The costs associated with reducing carbon emissions from existing housing, who should meet those costs and particularly, in respect of low-income households, interaction between carbon emission reductions and the Government’s ambitions to reduce poverty
  • The specific challenges which may arise in relation to housing of special architectural or historical interest

More details and information on submitting evidence at www.parliament.uk

The Committee invites to submit written memoranda addressing these topics by Wednesday 26th September 2007.

Green breakfast in Lancashire 12 Sept

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Lancashire Economic Partnership (LEP) are hosting a free green breakfast networking event, Profit the Environment and your Business, aimed at construction and manufacturing businesses on 12 Sept.  From the LEP website:

– Are you taking effective measures to reduce your carbon footprint?
– Is your competitiveness stalling on environmental performance?
– Are you buying energy at the best time and price?
– Are your green credentials strong enough to win new business?
– Is your business exposed to energy risk?
– Are you in full control of your water supply and wastewater?
– How much profit are you throwing out with the waste?
– Are you ready for new environmental legislation coming your way?

more info and registration at the LEP website

Changing our carbon footprint…

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Earlier this week the Government launched the draft Government and Industry Sustainable Construction Strategy for conusltation.Reducing on-site waste, using sustainable materials, and increasing skills in the workforce are just some of the 35 or so  targets set out for our industry, in a strategy that will undoubtedly have a profound impact on education, design, procurement, construction and facilities management.

The draft strategy’s key areas include:

  • Reducing the carbon footprint of activities within the construction sector
  • Production of zero net waste at construction site level
  • Developing voluntary agreements and initiatives between the construction industry and its clients with the aim of reducing the carbon footprint and use of resources within the built environment
  • Creating a safer industry by improving skills, boosting the numbers of workers taking part in training programmes, and retaining more skilled workers.

Stephen Timms, Minister for construction  said:

“The threat of global warming is of enormous concern to the community, and it demands change from Government, industry and the public alike.

“Currently the built environment accounts for around 47% of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK (Construction accounts for 1.5%). Not only must the construction industry rise to the challenge of reducing those emissions, it must also consider how it will adapt its products to deal with the impacts of unavoidable climate change.”

 Use your chance to comment – download the consultation document 

2030 – just when you thought …

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… meanwhile the following email posting from the USA Architecture 2030 programme makes sobering reading.

Architecture 2030:

Rapidly accelerating climate change (global warming), which is caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is now fueling dangerous regional and global environmental events. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration illustrates that buildings are responsible for almost half (48%) of all GHG emissions annually. Seventy-six percent of all electricity generated by US power plants goes to supply the Building Sector. Therefore, immediate action in the Building Sector is essential if we are to avoid hazardous climate change.

Just when we thought we were making a difference…

Wal-Mart, the largest “private” purchaser of electricity in the world is investing a half billion dollars to reduce the energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of their existing buildings by 20% over the next 7 years. “As one of the largest companies in the world, with an expanding global presence, environmental problems are our problems,” said CEO Lee Scott. The CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized coal-fired power plant, in just one month of operation each year, would negate Wal-Mart’s entire effort. Continue reading →

The 2010 Imperative – (NW Sustainability Network)

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Further to the NW sustainability network initial meeting this week, noted the following on the USA’s Arctitecture 2030 programme web site, the 2010 Imperative

How about carbon neutral campuses (campi?) for the NW by 2010 ???

To successfully impact global warming and world resource depletion, it is imperative that ecological literacy become a central tenet of design education. Yet today, the interdependent relationship between ecology and design is virtually absent in many professional curricula. To meet the immediate and future challenges facing our professions, a major transformation of the academic design community must begin today. To accomplish this, The 2010 Imperative calls upon this community to adopt the following:

Beginning in 2007, add to all design studio problems that:
“the design engage the environment in a way that dramatically reduces or eliminates the need for fossil fuel.”

By 2010, achieve complete ecological literacy in design education, including:

  • design / studio
  • history / theory
  • materials / technology
  • structures / construction
  • professional practice / ethics

By 2010, achieve a carbon-neutral design school campus by:

  • implementing sustainable design strategies (optional – LEED Platinum / 2010 rating)
  • generating on-site renewable power
  • purchasing green renewable energy and/or certified renewable energy credits (REC’s, Green Tags), 20% maximum

After the flood

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We have to tackle carbon emmisions if we want to avoid more flooding, argues Tony Juniper on his Comment is Free blog

Dealing with the effects of heavy rain is one thing but, if recent climate change research proves correct, how will we cope with what lies ahead?

The future of the Code for Sustainable Homes – Making a rating mandatory

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From the Communities and  Local Government website:

The Code measures the sustainability of a new home. It went live in England as a voluntary standard in April 2007. This consultation document follows on from the positive response received to Building a Greener Future: Towards Zero Carbon Development, where we asked if rating against the Code should be mandatory.

Consultation is aimed at Housing development industry, architects, construction companies, planners, energy efficiency specialists, environmental stakeholders and academics.

Goodbye zero champion…hello sustainability blog…

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Zero Champion blog has been re-branded and given a face lift, as Zero Hero ** says

It’s part of the development I’m working on which will see this space being integrated more closely to the websites my company publishes – Building, Building Design, Property Week and Building Services Journal

check out the new look at Sustainability Blog

** (sorry couldn’t resist that)

open source sustainability

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I am becoming more and more aware of and convinced of the role that open source approaches and concepts can have in our built environment.  Based on the open source approach to IT, we are starting to see open source architecture…education …and sustainability.  In addition I see benchmark and best practice clubs transforming themselves into innovation circles or networks.  (Perhaps the next generation of Construction Best Practice Clubs??)
In essence, to me it means collaboratively working together to address sustainability issues, focusing effort on what matters,  promoting access to the design and production of goods and knowledge, rather than everyone focusing on their own thing, duplicating effort, be it a product, strategy or service.

Competitiveness arises from starting at a more mature level.

What is open source, one of the best definitions comes from, Open Eco Source  a web base tool, which ‘will help speed up the distribution of available knowledge and connect efforts that aim to create a sustainable environment’

The three rules for open source are: nobody owns it, everybody uses it, and everybody can improve it. … The open source web-base tools are fantastically powerful and the fastest collaborative media we have to shape our future.

or the wiki definition:

Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge.

Building purple haze…

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The post to Worldchanging on green issues in New York City caught my eye over the weekend:

Around 85 percent of all the buildings that will exist in New York City in 25 years are already standing, according to reporter J. Alex Tarquino in this past Sunday’s edition of The New York Times. 80 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas pollution is created by building energy use — with residential buildings taking up about one-third of that energy.

So however advanced green building methods become, however energy-efficient, we’re going to make the biggest gains in cutting energy use — thus lowering particulate and greenhouse gas pollution — by transforming these older buildings.

Even though the New York way of living is inherently very energy-efficient, compared to other American cities or communities, we can do better, reports Tarquino:

The article makes a valid point of focusing equally on the facilities management aspect of the built enviroment as the construction.

There are so many figures around as to the built environments contribution to carbon and other ”greenhouse’ gases.

Sometimes it feels we are patting fog…do we really know? As Dave over at Carbon Coach has been pointing out for many years now…if carbon gases were purple then the sky would have changed colour in our lifetimes,  and we would be living in a purple haze now – but we would take action …but as its colourless…we don’t.