17-18 November; the Sydney SBE16 conference

This event took place during 17-18 November in the Australian National Maritime Museum, an original and successful venue. This was a fairly large conference, with over 140 peer-reviewed papers and 200+ delegates. As with most conferences, there was a mix of plenary and parallel sessions, in this case a mix of 3 and 4 parallel sessions.

The principal organizers were Prof. Deo Prasad (Chair), Dr. Lan Ding and A/Prof. Francesco Fiorito. The event benefitted from financial support by Urban Growth NSW, a government urban development organization and from other support by the CRC organization and UNSW. It was also perhaps not unhelpful for the success of the event that one of its supporters was Professor Lucy Turnbull, wife of the Prime Minister.

Plenary speakers included Prof. Helen Lochhead, Dean of the UNSW faculty of Built Environment, who gave a very informative and useful presentation on the reconstruction efforts launched in New York after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Prof. Deo Prasad gave a speech on lowering the carbon footprint of buildings and cities, Nils Larsson presented an overview of the activities and plans of the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GABC) and Man Kit Leung from HKGBC provided an overview of the WSBE17 global conference to be held in Hong Kong in June 2017.

Professor Mat Santamouris of UNSW, who has a staggeringly impressive resumé, outlined the problems of increasing demand for space cooling in many countries. The plenary presentations were concluded by Prof. Peter Newton speaking on low-carbon transitions and Prof. Dennis Else on carbon value engineering.

Presentations of refereed papers in the parallel sessions took place successfully under conditions of limited time allocations and some technical difficulties.

Nils L.