Last Partner-Meeting in Polcenigo/Italy

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Last week the members of the MountEE-Team travelled from Sweden, France (Pyrenees and Alps), Germany and Austria to the small village of Polcenigo/Italy for the last partner meeting. The first day started with a very interesting input from stakeholders working in the field of sustainable construction. Especially the ITACA-Protocol and the CESBA-Initiative are very interesting ones:

 ITACA-Protocol

The Protocol ITACA is a tool for the certification of the level of environmental sustainability of buildings of different uses. It is ‘promoted by Italian regions and managed by a specific committee with representatives of the regions and participation of association iiSBE Italy and ITC-CNR. The protocol is based on SBMethod, chosen in 2002 as a reference by the Italian regions. We’ve already had an article on this tool in the Blog, for more information click here.

 CESBA-Initiative

CESBA (Common European Sustainable Building Assessment) is an initiative for promoting the European wide harmonization of sustainable building assessments for public buildings. The inducement of CESBA is the perception of the variety of sustainable building certification systems in European regions and the need to find a common framework for building assessments. For more information please click here

Partner-Meeting

During the partner meeting, we closed the work packages and had a reflection session on the MountEE project. Seen from our perspective the cooperation was very fruitful, and the consortium is proud to have realized more pilot buildings than planned (35 pilot buildings). Nevertheless 3 years is not much time in the field of sustainable construction and renovation and there is much left to do, due to the building stock in European countries. Therefore a follow-up project continuing seamlessly would make a lot of sense.

Recommendations

There are still lots of political decision makers, architects or construction companies hanging on the status quo regarding the construction or renovation of houses (public and private ones). This is to say it in short: quick, cheap, short-sighted. We’ve collected some recommendations for different target groups why sustainable construction and renovation is much more effective in the long term and how they can start the process (regulations, measures):

 

Decision makers on national level

  • Building owners have to have mandatory consultancy
  • Implement laws for
  • Quantitative objectives regarding energy demand for every new construction/renovation project
  • Use of certain percentage of local and ecological construction materials
  • Restriction of freestanding family houses
  • Implement a bonus-malus system for sustainable construction
  • Focus on the renovation of existing building stock instead of new construction

Decision makers at regional/local level

  • Energy efficient buildings are allowed to consume more space
  • Every political decision maker has to attend a study trip at least once a year to see what other regions are doing
  • Calculate how much money is spent on energy consumption by each member of the community and how much money can be saved
  • Awareness raising measures

Architects

  •  Think global at the long term
  • Good publicity for your business
  • Ethic view on architecture
  • Health issues (quality of life)
  • More subsidies when building green
  • New and emerging market

Construction Companies

  • Adapt now or you want access the market anymore
  • Sustainable construction is an EU-directive, so adapt now before you get forced
  • Once learned it’s as easy as “conventional construction”
  • Health reasons (eco-products better for employees)
  • Ecological renovation is a huge market you can gain access to

What do you think? Which more arguments can convince the above mentioned target groups too? I’m looking forward to read your arguments!

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