New and tightening sustainability requirements are hitting the construction sector at an increasing pace. Irish Green Building Council membership engagement officer Lenny Antonelli goes through the main requirements – and offers clues on how to keep ahead.

The implications of planning on Ireland’s carbon emissions and the importance of building climate-safe homes were discussed at the Irish Green Building Council’s (IGBC) annual residential conference, Better Homes.

In this #BuildingLife Ambassador Spotlight Series, Passive House Plus is profiling leaders who have endorsed the Irish Green Building Council’s (IGBC) call to address the environmental impacts of buildings across their lifecycle.

Research, led by Technological University of the Shannon, has identified significant skills and labour shortages in the built environment sector. The study highlights how this challenges Ireland in reaching its climate targets and points out possible solutions.

The week of live and online events will show how to accelerate our transition to a more sustainable and resource efficient built environment

Mass timber comes into its own in terms of decarbonising tall buildings, which tend to rely on high embodied carbon materials such as steel and reinforced concrete. But regulatory change is needed to enable mass timber to fulfil its potential, as IGBC head of policy and advocacy Marion Jammet explains.

The energy used to heat, cool and light our buildings is responsible for almost a quarter of Ireland’s national carbon emissions – with the carbon embodied in the buildings themselves representing over an eighth of the total, a new report has revealed.

The Irish Green Building Council (IGBC) today launched a new version of its Home Performance Index (HPI) sustainable home certification system at its annual residential conference, Better Homes 2022. The focus of the event was on delivering low carbon homes at scale.

In the #BuildingLife Ambassador Spotlight Series, Passive House Plus is profiling leaders who have endorsed the Irish Green Building Council’s call to address the environmental impacts of buildings across their lifecycle.

Addressing building life cycle emissions requires much deeper action than is currently planned, says Marion Jammet of the Irish Green Building Council.

We won’t be able to reduce the embodied carbon of construction fast enough just by switching to lower carbon materials, says Pat Barry of the Irish Green Building Council, so we urgently need smart design that allows us to build with less, and to create a genuine circular economy for building materials.

In late 2018, the IPCC issued a stark warning. It highlighted that limiting global warming to 1.5 C is crucial to avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. It also clearly established that achieving the goals of the Paris climate agreement will require action at an unprecedented pace and scale. To maximise the chances of limiting global warming to 1.5 C, all sectors of the economy must achieve significant emissions reductions, and the building sector must fully decarbonise by 2050.

New regulations over the last decade have substantially cut operational energy use in buildings, and with more building product manufacturers now publishing environmental data on their products, now is the time to move towards in-depth life cycle assessment to reveal the full environmental footprint of our buildings, Pat Barry of the Irish Green Building Council tells Passive House Plus.

Over the past couple of months, the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC) has been focusing on helping those in the industry to upskill during the lockdown.

Irish Green Building Council business development manager Marion Jammet reports on work by the IGBC to help make rollout of deep retrofit a reality.

The third annual Greenbuild Europe conference will be held in Dublin on 24-25 March 2020, at the Croke Park conference centre.

The Green Room, the Irish Green Building Council’s annual non-residential sustainable building gathering, takes place this year on 10 April in the Davenport Hotel, Dublin.

Fifty-four percent of Irish organisations participating in the World Green Building Trends 2018 SmartMarket Report expect their projects to be green by 2021 — well above the global average of 47%. “The number of green buildings has increased significantly in Ireland over the last five years,” said Pat Barry, CEO of the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC).

The Irish Green Building Council will host its Better Homes 2018 conference in the Alex Hotel, Dublin on Thursday 8 November.

The Irish Green Building Council has launched a new programme to measure the carbon footprint of construction products. The Environmental Product Declaration Ireland Programme (EPD Ireland) allows manufacturers to publish independently verified information about the environmental footprint of their products.

Establishing a building’s overall sustainability ultimately means quantifying the impacts of the materials used to construct it. Up till now, that’s been a laborious, time-consuming process. That might be about to change, explains Irish Green Building Council CEO Pat Barry.

At a time when the industry’s under increasing pressure to deliver cost-effective, robust, low energy homes at breakneck speed, one new west Dublin project is leading the way – while picking off sustainability targets for fun.

The Irish Green Building Council has launched a voluntary quality labelling scheme for new residential development in Dublin. The label, called the Home Performance Index (HPI), goes well beyond the existing building energy rating (BER) system to look at a wider range of issues that impact the quality and sustainability of new residential construction. 

The second Better Building conference will be held on 24 April in the Croke Park conference centre, Dublin. The inaugural conference at Royal Hospital Kilmainham last year sold out with nearly 400 attendees.

 
A framework for strategic sustainability is essential if we’re serious about greening the Irish built environment.
According to green architect Pat Barry, we should look no further than The Natural Step.