other news

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.

SBE16 Torino declared a success

The SBE16 Torino conference took place during the period February 17-19, as part of the international SBE series of events. The Torino conference was the second in a series of 20 events taking place this year, and can be declared to be very successful in all respects.

Although the theme (Towards post--carbon cities) was fairly specialized, about 140 delegates attended the 1 1/2 day event. The topic is consistent with the increased recent interest by researchers and EU funding programs in urban issues, especially at the small urban scale, with some extending to regional or territorial scale.

SBE partners launch international survey on effective climate change measures

CIB, UNEP-SBCI and FIDIC have decided to develop and implement a large-scale international survey on effective climate change mitigation measures in 2016. The content will benefit from the experience of the small pilot survey carried out by iiSBE in late 2015.

Excellent primer on climate change

We have recently come across a high-quality and primer on climate change, published by the SBC Energy Institute in Gravenhage, the Netherlands. The FactBook is dated October 2015, so it is quite up to date, and it covers all major issues related to climate change within its 75 pages. Go to or download the file here.

Happy New Year from iiSBE staff.