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Architectural Engineering and Design Management: Sustainability Themed Issue

This sustainability themed issue includes a selection of articles from the 6th International Conference on Innovation in Architecture, Engineering and Construction held at the Pennsylvania State University in 2010. Sustainability was selected as a theme due to the wide interest shown by authors in the topic reflecting the level of research activity being focused on various aspects of this timely and important area driven by global concerns about issues such as climate change and the depletion of fossil energy resources. It is widely recognized that the built environment is a major consumer of energy and contributor to the overall CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. In the UK, it accounts for an estimated 40% of energy consumption and more than 50% of all UK carbon emissions can be attributed to energy use in buildings. Although it has always been good practice to reduce energy consumption (and therefore CO2 emissions) during the design and construction of buildings, it has now become a matter of legal obligation. The Climate Change Act of 2008 established a long-term framework to tackle climate change and aims to lay the foundations for the transition to a low-carbon economy through unilateral legally binding emissions reduction targets. These were set to achieve a reduction of at least 34% in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and at least 80% by 2050. In response to the above pressures, the UK government initiated major steps to develop and implement strategies for sustainable development and low-carbon construction. This is now both influencing industrial practice and shaping the research agenda. A synthesis of the recommendations put forward by the Innovation and Growth Team in their Low Carbon Construction Final Report, grouped in key priority areas in terms of research themes is given below: