CESBA stands for Common European Sustainable Building Assessment and represents a bottom-up initiative towards promoting a harmonization of sustainable building assessment throughout Europe. Mountee is part of this European approach, mainly developing service package for local authorities.
CESBA welcomes the recent communication of the European Commission in its “Resource efficiency opportunities in the building sector” (COM (2014) 445 final) in an Initiative Policy Paper released in october 2014 and presented in Bruxelles, together with DG Environnement.
More than a common European approach to assess the environmental performance of buildings, CESBA also wants to promote a new culture of buildings in Europe – one that will be more likely to take into account the overall impact of construction on the European environment. In this perspective, the CESBA partners propose several concrete recommendations.
- Promotion of a common open source approach towards EU building assessment
– Adoption of affordable and operable key performance indicators at EU level
– Necessity to coordinate diverging/ different national approaches
– Develop comparable assessments
– Share best practices
– Use online tools (social media, platforms) for networking and creating synergies
– Avoid a complex business environment
– Integration of regional and local specificities
- Promotion of the use of assessment in public initiatives for the built environment
– The EU Ecolabel for buildings currently under development could benefit from the CESBA methodology and key performance indicators
– Introduce mandatory EU Green Public Procurement criteria based on the agreed EU Framework of common indicators
– EU funding for public building projects must become conditional upon applying Green Public Procurement criteria
– And also in incentives based policy, building codes, urban plans…
- Consider the building in its local and regional context
– Reach political and management support at regional and local levels
– Achieve Regional sustainable building strategies and action plans
– Monitor local needs and specificities
– Favour local practices and resources in the building sector
– Using EU Regional Funds to develop a long term sustainable building framework
– Creation and stimulation of sustainable building clusters
On this base, CESBA calls on both the public and private sectors to gather their knowledge and power to move the sustainable building agenda forward. These joint efforts could lead to tremendous impacts that will benefit the people as well as the environment.
To get more informations on CEBA, you can visit the wiki CESBA
