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GBC Italia took part to the meeting organized by UNECE on the 4th of April 2012;  The delegation of GBC Italia was composed by Mauro Roglieri and Francesco Bedeschi, both members of the Executive Board of GBC Italia.

The participation to this prestigious meeting matches very well with GBC Italia’s mission of diffusing the knowledge of Green Building Rating Systems in the relevant National and International authorities, to support the promotion and diffusion of usage of protocols as a tool to drive building market transformation towards sustainability.

The objective of this seminar was to discuss cost-efficient and “green” solutions, which can make the housing sector more sustainable. These include improvements to energy efficiency, environmental performance (water and waste management), and resilience to climate change. Greening homes is a part of the green economy concept, which is in turn at the heart of renewed efforts to integrate environmental and social considerations within the mainstream of economic decision-making in the run-up to Rio+20 and beyond.

The seminar has being organized back to back with a meeting of the UNECE Working Group to discuss a possible framework convention on sustainable housing. More than 70 UNECE member state representatives attended the working group meeting. More than 30 participated to the seminar, which facilitated the identification of priorities for the preparation of the September 2013 Ministerial Conference on Housing and Land Management.

GBC Italia presented the ‘bottom-up’ role that Green Rating Systems such as GBC Home or LEED® can have as an accelerator of change.

Access to the UNECE event page: UNECE – Greening Homes

Download presentation: GBC Italia: how rating systems can drive the change

[Sources: UNECE, GBC Italia, MR Energy]

A great success for the presentation of GBC Home in Trento, with more than 200 people attending the conference and the presentation of the pilot cases, seven front-running projects which are adopting the new protocol as a ‘sustainability quality certification’.

The launch of GBC Home captured the attention of the important media Radio24 and the program ‘Smart City’, which dedicated an issue to GBC Home™ and LEED®, which can be played by clicking here (in Italian).

With the formal approval of the Steering Committee during its meeting of March 2nd 2012, MR Energy has become an official member of GBC Italia, in the category “Utilities, ESCOs, and energy companies”.

Becoming part of the National Association confirms a strategy which started already one year ago:

“The efforts are surely paid back by the great results we are obtaining, and that will be confirmed next week with the launch of the new certification scheme GBC Home, in Trento. We can really obtain even more important results for our Nation, contributing to the recovery of a sector which is now suffering very hardly the economic crisis. For this reason the President, the Executive Board and all GBC members are working hard to convince Public Administrations about the importance of using tools such as GBC Home to put in place sustainable development programs for the cities and the territories of their competence. This is, by the way, required by the existing and upcoming European Directives”.

The declaration of Mauro Roglieri, Administrator of MR Energy Systems, member of the Executive Board of GBC Italia, in charge for international affairs. He coordinates the activities of the Policy Task Force of GBC Italia and he is a member of the Policy Task Force of the European Network of WGBC (World Green Building Council).

Why?

Emissions Trading

‘Zero impact’ does not exist. Human activities have always had an impact on the environment, since they involve the consumption of resources and energy. Over the centuries, industrial and technological development have dramatically improved our living standard and guaranteed us health, well being, protection from extreme events, food supply and boundless mobility. At which price. Our impact on the environment and climate has increased more and more, reaching today a level which is not sustainable anymore for our planet.

Policy Development

Governments around the world agree that there is an urgent need of a change in this trend. Many policies have been developed at national, European or international level aiming at the broad adoption of best practices which make our activities more sustainable.
Change is not easy though, because it requires us  to change our habits as producers and as consumers too. But we need to act, and we need to do it quickly.

[Continue reading about our Vision..]

Green Building Council (GBC) Italia, always engaged in actions to promote the consensus on green building issues, attended the workshop held in Brussels on January 9th, 2012 in the framework of the implementation activities of the European Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings (Directive 2010/31/EU, EPBD recast). The purpose of the workshop was the presentation by DG Energy to the business stakeholders of the progress in the definition of a “voluntary common EU certification scheme for energy performance of non-residential buildings”. Mauro Roglieri, member of the GBC Italia board, represented the interests and the contribution of the association.

The first short version (“for evaluation purposes”) of the new GBC Italy Home protocol, which contains the guidelines for “design, build and restore residential buildings”, is now available for download on GBC Italia web site.

In Italy, where it represents a primary asset for the population, as well as a real and symbolic value, a house can be considered a preferential place and tool to spread the culture of sustainability, with the direct application of concepts such as energy conservation, water management, quality of the indoor environment, healthiness, sustainable materials, comfort  and connection with the territory.

After making a version of the 2009 New Construction and Renovations LEED Protocol for the national market, the undertaking of GBC Italia has been to produce a new tool addressed to the residential market.

On the basis of the American LEED ® for Homes Protocol, the document has been redrafted taking into consideration the Italian building peculiarities and construction models.

Info: www.gbcitalia.org

Copyright: GBC Italia

Bruxelles: “The EU Climate Policy Tracker (EU CPT – www.climatepolicytracker.eu) 2011, a newly updated and revised version of the 2010 study, reveals that despite improvements by nine Member States over the past year, some have achieved a worse score than last year.” “The average scoring remains low, warning that EU climate and energy policy is failing to put the EU on a course to 2050 decarbonisation.”

Does a economic development model exists where the three parameters society, health and environment have the same weight? Since a few years, energy and climate sustainability have become an integral part of global discussion about the future of our planet. Energy supply has always been a key element for every country’s government, as well as for any single person. But today people do have a different and higher understanding of the convenience of a sustainable development. The recent environmental disasters in the Mexican Gulf and in Fukushima had an impact on the development of global policies.

It’s from those basis that the green economy has started, an economy aware of environmental impact, which reduces wastes, rather than generating them, and reduces the consumption of non renewable resources, giving the right price to externalities. A low carbon economy, based on renewable energy, caring of social needs.

MR Energy is the consultant which can guide you through your sustainable development path, from strategy until execution of technological solutions. find out how in the  dedicated pages.

Enjoy your Green Economy!

Published in September 2011, the Guidelines on Carbon Management for Italian Universities are one of the main results of a project funded by the Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea, as part of the Carbon Management Policy for the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

The project idea is that higher education institutions can take a leader position in turning sustainability into action by stimulating sustainable processes, practices and behaviors to be applied both in their field and to the whole community.

An effective policy on carbon management within a college allows to reduce the emissions of a large real estate assets, to contract the energy consumption and costs, and thus to improve the economic balance of the universities, with the opportunity to invest differently any saving.
It also has a significant educational relapse on students, who can endorse the concepts related to energy and environmental sustainability at first by experiencing them directly during their university years, and then offering them in the professional roles they will play in companies or public bodies.

Through its previous experience in Thetis SpA, Mauro Roglieri, among the main authors of the paper, has contributed to the project ideation working in team with engineers of the Ministry for the Environment and Project Managers of the Ca’ Foscari University.