In an earlier post, I argued that the scope of ’sustainability’ extends beyond the dominant concerns of low carbon design and energy conservation and how we need to continuously commit to the core principles of sustainable development rather than allow a shallow linguistic fatigue persuade us to abandon the term, simply because we are tired [...]

Mel Starrs has provided an excellent post on the way in which LEED and BREEAM treat biodiversity. Apparently, there is no common approach to dealing with this aspect of the environment among current assessment tools. The post highlights the main differences between two of the most frequently used methods.
Though the post draws heavily on the recently [...]

I would like to have attended the Passivhaus seminar at BRE Watford today, but I had other commitments I couldn’t change. I’ve been interested in Passivhaus since examining it as a possible starting point for the Welsh housing industry to meet the Welsh Assembly Government’s aspiration that all new buildings should be zero carbon from [...]

The 10 Dumbest Green Buildings on Earth : Green Building Elements. So long as we rely on checklist based methods for assessing the sustainability of buildings there will always be a temptation to ‘play the game.’ Assessment methods need to to be sensitive to context and purpose, but making them so is not straightforward.
Assessment is [...]

Casey Cole over at carbon unlimited has another interesting post about the huge task of upgrading the existing housing stock in the UK. He identifies heat as being the most difficult component to eliminate of projected 2050 carbon dioxide emissions. Viable solutions are thin on the ground and the eventual mix will depend on local [...]

This post on the carbon limited blog puts some numbers to the problem of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from housing and underlines the fact that most of the problem lies with the houses we have already built. Why do focus so much attention on zero carbon new build?