The climate emergency requires that the built environment will have to be zero carbon. All new buildings must be zero carbon by 2025 and the existing building stock will require significant retrofitting to be carbon neutral by 2050. A whole-life interdisciplinary approach is essential, which will require mainstreaming decarbonisation skills in all the built environment professions.
Education and training are key for ensuring the professions can achieve this. How will the current higher education curricula adequately meet the challenge and what can be done to positively plan for the future?
In November 2020, the refereed journal Buildings & Cities (B&C) published a special issue ‘Education and Training: Mainstreaming Zero Carbon’, guest edited by Fionn Stevenson and Alison Kwok. All papers are free to access here. The special issue raised three challenges:
How can education and training be rapidly changed to ensure the creation of zero-carbon built environments?
How can this transition be implemented successfully?
What positive examples and models can be drawn upon or adapted?
This joint virtual event with B&C will use the themes and challenges from the special issue to discuss a rapid change agenda for built environment education. It will be seeking solutions that are top-down as well as bottom-up and look for a new range of interdependent processes to occur across:
Central government
Accreditation bodies and Professional institutes
Universities; and
NGOs
Convenor: Richard Lorch, Buildings & Cities
Chair: Bill Gething, University of West England
Speakers: Fionn Stevenson, University of Sheffield
Alison Kwok, University of Oregon
Gavin Killip, University of Oxford
Katy Janda, University College London
Malini Srivastava, University of Minnesota
Respondents: David Gloster, Director of Education, RIBA
Lynne Jack, Heriot Watt University & Past President, CIBSE
Online: Zoom
Timing: Monday 1st February 2021, 17.00 – 18.30
Videos of speakers at the debate, courtesy of Building & Cities: