Carbon Neutral Building

EXPLORING NEW TERRAINS:The Next Design School. Keynote lecture presented at the 2016 Architectural Education Forum, School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP) of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa. Four fundamental perspectives on architectural education, postulating a design school of the future in its essential characteristic and questions. By the “Next Design School” I mean both the next level of development for particular schools and, just maybe, the next major viable paradigm for design education—not just iin Africa, but as a model. A radical innovation is proposed in each of the four domains. The Next School will be defined by distinctive innovations from the perspective of each of these fundamental terrains. The Next Design School is created not in theory or discussions alone, but in actions. I offer four representative collective actions,, one from each terrain:
• Solving the climate crisis by design requires that we educate every student to be able to design carbon-neutral buildings.
• Constructing a shared knowledge ecology integrates our collective research and design efforts to become interconnected and available, and one way to do that is via an open-source digital design strategies app.
• Cultivating a collaborative work culture means including what works from the traditional, modern and post-modern by enacting the four foundational ways of being together: 
    + Acting with authenticity
    + Being cause in the matter of your concerns
    + Being committed to something bigger than yourself
    +  Practicing integrity
• Developing the Inner Architect requires a developmental curriculum founded in practices that accelerate students’ development in consciousness along several lines of design intelligence.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Beside safety and security new challenge for Aviation industry is also climate change. A vision has been outlined for international Aviation industry comprising of zero carbon emission growth in the future. Challenge is equally distributed along all stake holders of industry to achieve the goal of zero carbon emission by 2050. At present Aviation contributes 2% of CO2 emission in over all emissions which can reach up to 3% by 2050. To achieve this goal IATA has been playing leading role to bring all industry partners on common platform that includes manufacturers, Airports, Airlines, Governments, infrastructure providers, technology and economy etc.
A growing carbon footprint is a big concern for the whole world. To achieve a carbon neutral growth of aviation industry IATA has planned a Four Pillar Strategy which has been accepted by aviation and government regulations. These four Pillars are Infrastructure, Technology, economic instruments and operations. To achieve this goal is not impossible for the aviation industry as industry has a record of achieving impossible in the past. Aviation industry has achieved 70% fuel efficiency in last 40 years. This strategy helps industry to asses and implement the measures for carbon neutral growth by improvement in Air Traffic Management, Air frames, Airport operations and achieving fuel efficiency or finding out substitute fuels which will not contribute towards carbon emission.
This framework also elaborates on increasing cooperation and coordination among different industry partners and governments for carbon neutral growth. Whole industry is united moving towards common goal of zero carbon emission.
In this document details are given about that how industry is getting united and moving towards a goal by modernising the aviation infrastructure, operations, developing new technologies and what contribution economic elements have in achieving this goal.

This fully updated Third Edition covers principles of designing buildings that use the sun for heating, wind for cooling, and daylight for natural lighting. Using hundreds of illustrations this book offers practical strategies that give the designer the tools they need to make energy efficient buildings. The focus of this 800 page edition is net-zero energy and carbon-neutral design to meet Architecture 2030 targets. Four excerpts are attached.

This paper systematically reviews literature on passive heating and cooling of buildings using roof ponds. The main aims were to gain a detailed understanding of different roof pond configurations and their performance, compare effectiveness of different roof pond variants, evaluate performance of different roof pond variants relative to other passive design techniques, explore effects of climatic conditions and various design configurations on the performance of roof ponds, and identify gaps in knowledge and data. Overall, 19 roof pond cooling and 4 roof pond heating systems were identified. This review suggests that, in some cases, roof ponds can provide year-round thermal comfort while reducing demand for active heating and cooling systems.  Therefore, they can be utilized in efforts towards the goal of carbon-neutral design. Roof ponds with wet gunny bags, shaded roof ponds, ventilated roof ponds, and roof ponds with movable insulation proved to be more effective relative to other variants of roof pond cooling systems. Comparing performance relative to other passive strategies showed that, in many cases, roof pond cooling systems are about equally effective in maintaining indoor thermal comfort. Meteorological conditions, water depth, roof deck material, and thickness of the insulating panel are the main factors affecting performance of roof ponds. Several areas of weakness in the literature are identified. Future research should, among other things, provide more detailed knowledge on performance of all roof pond variants, further explore suitability of roof ponds relative to other passive design measures, examine effectiveness of roof ponds when combined with other passive design measures, analyze life-cycle costs of roof ponds, and provide more knowledge on their real-world application.

A Best Academic Paper at the Integral European Conference, the primary investigation of this paper is: How can architects address climate change by designing to place people into rich and significant relationships with Nature? Architecture is a powerful mediator of the relationship between humans and Nature. Solving climate change will mean having people take action for nature. To have people act for Nature, they must care for it. To care for it, people first have to have a relationship with Nature, which requires experiences of Nature––via architecture. However, contemporary sustainable design in the US takes a particular prospect on Nature, one dominated by performance assessment, a valid but limited approach that leaves out ecological pattern, human experiences, and the cultural meaning of “connecting to Nature.” In doing so, it fails to communicate with most of its non-scientific audience and thus disempowers its mission to solve the climate crisis by design. Because building energy use is about half of the cause of greenhouse gases, the building community has the greatest opportunity to create solutions.
The most common contemporary interpretation (or explaining narrative) of sustainable design is that it is defined by its technologies and that improving technologies will lessen architecture’s impact on Nature, and further, that technology is most often defined as energy technology and measured in terms of energy performance. Untangling the stories driving energy use and technology in buildings across generations helps us understand the alternative stories that drive today’s “design with Nature.”
This article engages important, timeless questions from the cultural perspective where our collective stories arise: How shall we design to relate people to Nature, particularly with respect to energy? What is our understanding of this particular ‘Nature’ to which we want to connect and relate via design? What are our cultural stories and narratives that explain Nature and energy to us? The article explores different ideas of what people think Nature and energy are and their concomitant intentions for designing relationships to Nature. Each primary view gives rise to a variety of metaphors in language that can describe its understanding. When used consciously, these design metaphors are powerful tools for generating design solutions and for organizing the many smaller ideas contained in any design project. Each primary view uses its metaphors to construct a different story about energy and natural resources.
Keywords: metaphor, story, design intention, levels of complexity, traditional, modern, postmodern, integral, integral theory, nature, building energy use, climate change, carbon-neutral, net-zero

Universities have always had an important leadership role in society in demonstrating the types of changes that need to occur with respect to the prime issues of the time. All around the world, universities are lining up to declare themselves the next carbon neutral school as part of the global trend of becoming “sustainable.” But what does it really mean to be carbon neutral?

In 2007 Victoria University’s School of Architecture and Design (SoAD) declared themselves the first carbon neutral campus in the world through the use of sponsored and purchased carbon credits. However 100% reliance on offset schemes is not the answer as it does not guarantee the capture of carbon forever. Also, the continuing purchase of carbon offsets could be costly and  maintaining business-as-usual without any significant changes will result in continuing environmental degradation as a result of the SoAD’s unsustainable activities. This research explores various solutions for reducing the three biggest factors that contribute towards the emissions, which are energy, transport and waste. It looks at the difference between behavioural changes (low cost) and technological investment (high cost) in order for SoAD to reduce its carbon footprint to meet three possible reduction targets, established by this research as 25%, 50% and 90%. The findings are that 25% could be saved through simple behavioural changes which cost very little, as they are mainly related to avoiding wastage, 50% could be saved through a combination of low and high cost measures, and 90% comes from considerable investment in new technologies or drastic reduction in use.

A further aim of the research is to translate all possible savings into other means, such as knowing how much carbon or land is saved, using a measure such as the ecological footprint, and more importantly what these savings mean to the third world where resources are scarce and expensive. If SoAD’s wasteful activities from neglect can be translated into saving people’s lives in other 2 nations, it might lead to more responsible energy use. What this research indicates is that for SoAD to be carbon neutral various factors need to be considered and user behaviour is paramount.

This poster compiles the Design Strategy maps spreads from Sun, Wind & Light, 3rd edition into a single large page. Design Strategy maps show some of the relationships among Design Strategies and Strategy Bundles, across nine levels of nested complexity, from Materials (Level 1) to Neighborhoods (Level 9)..

Note: Conference presentation files, the paper, and Excel workbook are attached.
The " Architecture 2030 " organization established targets for reducing fossil fuel use in new buildings to zero by 2030, providing a simple metric to compare energy performance relative to typical buildings. However, they do not provide metrics for site net-zero energy and plus-energy projects. This paper defines a metric that allows buildings to be compared on the same scale for both the 2030 Targets and performance beyond these, including plus-energy. The Energy Balance Index (EBI) assesses energy performance relative to a typical building's energy use intensity (EUI) based on climate and building type. EBI is defined as the inverse of the designed building's net site EUI divided by the EUI of a benchmark building, expressed as a percentage. Revealing what is obscured in the 2030 targets, the site EUI used accounts for both energy demand intensity (EDI) and on-site energy production intensity (EPI). The EBI scale is set at zero for site net-zero performance. Extensions are proposed for 2030 Targets, up to 2060, with trends for: 1) energy demand, 2) off-site renewables, 3) on-site renewables, and 4) renewable energy exported. This allows designers to have working schematic design phase targets for energy demand and production. Keywords: energy targets, energy balance index, energy use intensity, energy demand intensity, energy production intensity, Architecture 2030, site net-zero energy, plus-energy, net-positive energy, high-performance buildings

"In a time when visual culture informs many design decisions, the most relevant aspect of the third edition of Sun, Wind and Light is its dedication to the generation of form based on energy issues. SWL continues to digest and simplify the mass of new information that has flooded in since 2001. Although it has added 225 new illustrations, 4 analysis techniques, 6 high performance assessment techniques, 15 design strategies, 7 synergies, and 9 bundles, it has tamed this expansion by splitting itself into a smaller printed version and a more encyclopedic electronic version, in addition to tying together the new and existing design strategies into “Synergies” and “Bundles.” The new organization is very logical, so much so that I’m considering re-organizing my ECS lesson plans.
"

The purpose of the Bundle-Up! game is to make learning climatic design strategies and their complex
interrelationships fun and easy. The project uses the concept of Bundles developed in the research
project, “A New Knowledge Structure for Net-Zero Design.” The idea of design strategy bundles is to
resolve conflicts and tensions among strategies by proposing related sets of design strategies that
address recurring problems designers face. A Bundle identifies several discreet design ideas that apply
in a particular situation across three scales. The game outlines a set of rules for users to create their
own bundles specific to a particular project. Bundle-Up! is used with a set of instructions like a typical
board game. It is designed to use design strategies from the book Sun, Wind & Light, 3rd edition. There
is no one right solution, but some answers are better than others, and solutions that follow the rules are
all acceptable. Bundle-Up! can be played by one person or several in collaboration. The game pieces
(more than 100) each represent a climatic design strategy, each with a unique graphic and other
identifying features and descriptions. A prototype was tested with peer teachers and feedback was very
positive. The Bundle-Up! game has since been tested in fifth-year B. Arch design studios and with
second-year technology course students. Feedback has helped refine the game and its instructions,
along with the curricular exercises that accompany it.
Keywords: passive design, design process, knowledge structure, education, design strategies

In North America, " Architecture 2030 " has established targets for reducing building fossil fuel use to zero by 2030, now called " zero net carbon " (ZNC). This paper introduces the Carbon Balance Index (CBI) as a simple metric that allows performance comparison along a spectrum from typical buildings that depend entirely on fossil fuels to those that export energy, comparing a range of carbon performance. CBI assesses greenhouse gas production (as CO 2 equivalent) relative to a typical building's carbon use intensity (CUI), using EUI data categorized by climate and building type. CUI is equal to the building's EUI times a CO 2 e conversion factor/s based on fuel type/s used. CBI is defined as the designed building's net CUI divided by the CUI of a typical building, expressed as a percentage. The methods for calculating CUI benchmarks, the designed building's CUI and CBI are explained in simple terms. Building on earlier work on the Energy Balance Index (EBI), the CBI and EBI targets, curves and zero points are compared. Carbon-neutral buildings have CBI = 0. Positive CBI means some fossil fuels are used and carbon is produced, while negative CBI projects " consume " carbon by exporting excess energy and offsetting fossil grid energy.

Universities have always had an important leadership role in society in demonstrating the types of changes that need to occur with respect to the prime issues of the time. All around the world, universities are lining up to declare themselves the next carbon neutral school as part of the global trend of becoming "sustainable." But what does it really mean to be carbon neutral? In 2007 Victoria University's School of Architecture and Design (SoAD) declared themselves the first carbon neutral campus in the world through the use of sponsored and purchased carbon credits. However 100% reliance on offset schemes is not the answer as it does not guarantee the capture of carbon forever. Also, the continuing purchase of carbon offsets could be costly and maintaining businessas- usual without any significant changes will result in continuing environmental degradation as a result of the SoAD's unsustainable activities. This research explores various solutions for reducing th...

Book Description:
According to many authorities the impact of humanity on the earth is already overshooting the earth’s capacity to supply humanity’s needs. This is an unsustainable position. This book does not focus on the problem but on the solution, by showing what it is like to live within a fair earth share ecological footprint.

The authors describe numerical methods used to calculate this, concentrating on low or no cost behaviour change, rather than on potentially expensive technological innovation. They show what people need to do now in regions where their current lifestyle means they are living beyond their ecological means, such as in Europe, North America and Australasia. The calculations focus on outcomes rather than on detailed discussion of the methods used. The main objective is to show that living with a reduced ecological footprint is both possible and not so very different from the way most people currently live in the west.

The book clearly demonstrates that change in behaviour now will avoid some very challenging problems in the future. The emphasis is on workable, practical and sustainable solutions based on quantified research, rather than on generalities about overall problems facing humanity.


Review of the book:
"Informed, informative, scholarly, insightful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking... [A] vitally necessary addition to professional, academic, corporate, and governmental library Environmental Studies reference collections." - The Midwest Book Review, June 2013

"‘Sustainability’ is a term that is bandied about all the time, casually applied to anything that is slightly better than the usual, however marginal the improvement might be. This is a book that corrects that mis-use, setting out exactly what a sustainable lifestyle actually entails." – Jeremy Williams, Make Wealth History

"The key contribution of this collection is the provision of extensive, detailed comparative assessments of the relative ecological footprint associated with different dimensions of our resource consumption, providing at times surprising insights into the comparative impact of, for example, automobile versus air travel, or the ecological footprint reduction that could be achieved with a lowering of meat consumption." – Canadian Studies in Population, Debra J. Davidson, University of Alberta

About the editors (and authors):
Robert and Brenda Vale are Professorial Research Fellows in the School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. They share common research interests in ecological footprinting and sustainable building design, and are both currently working on the new Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FRST) project to deliver ecological footprinting and systems approaches to sustainable development of communities.

Buildings could play a critical role in energy and food production while making high density cities more resilient. Productive fac¸ades (PFs), as flexible and multi-functional systems integrating photovoltaic (PV) and vertical farming (VF) systems, could contribute to transforming
buildings and communities from consumers to producers. This study analyses the architectural quality of the developed PF concept drawing on the findings of a web-survey conducted among experts e building professionals in Singapore. The developed design variants are
compared with regards to key design aspects such as fac¸ade aesthetics, view from the inside, materialisation, ease of operation, functionality and overall architectural quality. The study also compares and discusses the results of the web-survey with the results of a previously conducted door-to-door survey among the potential users e residents of the Housing & Development Board (HDB) blocks. The findings confirm an overall acceptance of the PF concept and
reveal a need for synergetic collaboration between architects/designers and other building professionals. Based on the defined PF design framework and the results of the two surveys, a series of recommendations and improved PF prototypes are proposed for further assessment and implementation in order to foster their scalability from buildings into communities and cities.

As we enter a decisive decade for sustainability, is the window of opportunity for hotels closing?
Following a decade of growth which brought jobs and fostered local and regional development, the tourism and hotel industry has repeatedly outperformed the global economy.
More than 3,000 new hotels opened their doors in 2020 alone. However, the industry is also responsible for nearly one-tenth of all carbon emissions globally, with the hotel sector accounting for almost a quarter of all tourism emissions.
Under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the hotel sector must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions per room per year by 66 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050 compared to 2010 (ITP, 2017). The technology required to decarbonize the industry is available now.
How do you see the calls for more sustainability within your organization and, in particular, our responsibility to bring about a carbon-neutral future?
View all responses from CEOs of the largest and most prominent hotel companies
(e.g. CEO Hilton; CEO Deutsche Hospitality; CEO NH Hotels; CEO Kempinski; CEO CitizenM): https://www.hospitalitynet.org/panel/125000028.html

International research suggests that the built environment may be responsible for approximately a third of global carbon emissions. It is therefore particularly appropriate that Victoria University’s Faculty of Architecture and Design, in Wellington, New Zealand has taken the significant step of becoming the
Southern Hemisphere’s first carbon neutral campus, and the world’s first carbon neutral Faculty of Architecture and Design. This is part of the Faculty’s long term commitment to sustainability in the built environment and is consistent with a growing international movement calling for Architecture Schools to be carbon neutral by 2010.

The process and opportunities that enabled the Faculty to become carbon neutral in May 2008 are outlined, including the preparation of a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, an emissions reduction and management plan and the audit and accreditation process. The successes and difficulties inherent in the approach taken are examined.

As well as reduced environmental impact, this paper analyses further significant anticipated benefits of the Faculty of Architecture and Design’s carbon neutral status, including opportunities to publish research and enhance the reputation of the Faculty and the significant opportunities arising for the development of new teaching tools and methods. Involvement and participation by students in reduction plans and the facilitation of a forum for debate and discussion about the future of carbon trading markets are also elaborated on.
It is anticipated that the process undertaken by Victoria University of Wellington’s Faculty of Architecture and
Design could be used as an example by other educational institutions moving towards becoming carbon neutral. It is posited that reducing and offsetting carbon emissions in academic institutions, particularly those responsible for the education of new generations of built environment professionals, could become an important part of the creation of a built environment that is better able to address mitigating the causes of climate change.

SEE VIDEO ON MY FRONT PAGE.
Twice a year, the Office of the Provost will host Mic/Nite, a “Pecha-Kucha Powered” social gathering in order to enhance the intellectual, interdisciplinary, and cultural life of the faculty and staff at UT Knoxville.

Design drives climate change; the form and space of buildings and cities have energy-use consequences leading to greenhouse gas emissions that affect the climate. Buildings use 70 percent of electricity and are responsible for about half of greenhouse gases. Architects and engineers nationally are committed to reversing climate change through better design. This presentation connects new research on knowledge structures for carbon-neutral design, an educational game for learning design strategies, and examples of student solutions. The combination of pre-industrial and high-tech design strategies are drawn from DeKay’s 800-page book, Sun, Wind & Light: Architectural Design Strategies (3rd edition), which includes scales from materials to neighborhoods. Yet, even these technical solutions are not enough to create change if people don’t care about nature. The presentation also includes five suggestions for connecting people to nature through design, drawn from his  other book, Integral Sustainable Design: Transformative Perspectives.​