We’re leaders on sustainability and the built environment
We have helped lead the debate on sustainability in the built environment for two decades. We realised from the start that sustainability was a ‘fuzzy buzzword’ with little consensus about what it meant in the construction sector. So we ran a series of regional and national workshops trying to forge agreement about what sustainability means and how construction professionals can make it meaningful in their work.
Overall, our work led us to the conclusion that sustainable construction includes at least four inter-related concerns:
- about the future
- about the natural environment
- about resources
- about ensuring a fair share for everyone
The concerns about the future and the natural environment and closely related to our work on climate change and buildings, where we have managed and carried out projects on both ‘mitigation’ (cutting emissions) and ‘adaptation’ (making us more resilient to a changing climate). Both of these will become more important and more pressing as global climate change takes hold.