meeting

News from January SBE Meeting in Paris

The coordinators of the planned SBE18-20 conferences that are part of the Sustainable Built Environment (SBE) series, held a meeting in Paris during 18-19 January, with the SBE partners who own and manage the series. Representatives of the series co-owners (Nils Larsson, Wim Bakens, Luis Bragança and Jean Félix) provided background on the series, which has been going since 2000, its objectives and future plans. Each event coordinator who attended then described the plans for their events.

Global ABC issues report on April meeting

The Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction or Global ABC held an organizational meeting in Paris on 18 and 19 April. The organization was launched at the COP21 event in Paris and will attempt to provide a platform for national governments, NGOs and private companies to coordinate their efforts to maintain global temperature increases to less than 2 deg.C.

This first meeting was intended only to establish the structure and process required to carry out this objective. About 90 people attended (around one big table in a very large room) and discussion took place in English and French, with simultaneous interpretation.

The Global ABC Secretariat has now issued the notes from the meeting, which appear to cover everything that took place. iiSBE will be involved in at least two working groups and we will keep you posted. We attach both the short informal iiSBE report and the official one, in two languages. The full report is worth reading.

N.L.

SBE series coordination meeting

On 5 and 6 March, a meeting was held at the offices of UNEP-SBCI in Paris, to coordinate actions related to SBE16 national conferences and the global WSBE17 Hong Kong conference. Most of the 20 national event organizers, except for some SBE16 organizers located in Australia and Asia who communicated by Skype. Meeting notes will soon be available.

Nils Larsson, SBE series coordinator.

iiSBE Annual General Meeting is coming up

The iiSBE Annual General Meeting (AGM) will take place in conjunction with the SB13 event in Graz (Austria) starting at 13:30 on 25 September. In addition to the election of new Directors, there will be discussion of progress in the SB conference series, detailed presentation on plans for the SB Challenge project for 2014, and a discussion of strategic issues, led by Greg Foliente. The AGM will be chaired by Luis Braganza, President of iiSBE.

Please note that iiSBE members are eligible for a 40 Euro discount on the SB13 Graz registration fees.

Annex 57 meets

The IEA Annex 57 research group on “Evaluation of Embodied Energy and Carbon Dioxide Emissions for Building Construction” was held on 22nd and 23rd April in Munich, Germany. This was the second meeting of the working phase of this group, which held a previous meeting in Cambridge in October 2012, as well as two preparatory meetings in Helsinki in 2011 and in Porto in May 2012. The group includes 29 participants from 17 countries.

Open House meets in Brussels

On Thursday, 25 July, we attended the Brussels Launch Event for the Open House (OH) project.

As stated by the OH steering group… the OPEN HOUSE project aims to merge existing methodologies for sustainability assessment of buildings towards a common view. With the aim of being widely adopted in Europe, the OPEN HOUSE methodology is developed in a fully transparent, collective and open process, with extensive communication and interaction between all stakeholders.

The small Brussels workshop event marked the successful completion of this project, which is of considerable interest from technical, process and market viewpoints. The many actors in this field range from essentially commercial systems such as BREEAM, DGNB, HQE and LEED; to NGOs with a permanent interest in the area but no specific system; and finally to government-funded research groups set up to encourage the development of a common model of building performance assessment within a defined time frame.