- Seminars
Ecobuild’s renowned seminar programme offered more than 100 sessions covering the most pressing and important issues for built environment professionals.
With the emphasis throughout on delivering practical and applied information, each seminar was carefully structured to provide key learning points, supported by case studies, analysis, and examples of best practice. The topics were grouped into the following streams: future energy, getting water wise, regulations revealed, performance matters, refurbishing Britain, urban planning and the public realm, sustainable by design, making the most of markets, beyond construction, installer business, practial installer, and simplifying standards, guides and tools.
To view available seminar presentations, please click on the relevant speaker(s) name to download their presentation. You will be prompted for login details. If you did not attend ecobuild and would like to review the presentations please click here to obtain a username and password.
There has never been such an important time for micro and community scale generation. Government policy is being directed at it, new products and solutions are becoming available, and best practice and thinking are being refined and developed. This series of seminars investigated the market drivers for micro and small scale generation, understanding how to find the right scale solution for the right situation, and how to specify each of the core technologies as stand alone or as integrated solutions.
Management of water in the built environment has never been more topical. These seminars provided practical guidance on the 2010 upgrade to building regulations, sustainable water use, and water management and efficiency in both new and existing buildings. The seminars also addressed rainwater harvesting, SUDS, and the role of planning in mitigating flood risk.
Responding to the amount of regulation, codes and standards, and the speed of their introduction, provides a challenge for many in the sector, particularly in a period of downturn. Whether it is the latest on EPBD, EPCs and DECs, Parts F&L, BREEAM, the Definition of Zero Carbon and the Code for Sustainable Homes, this series of seminars helped visitors understand the application of the regulations to design, planning, construction and refurbishment.
The drive to design and construct lower carbon buildings is clear. But better new buildings will only emerge by learning about new techniques and materials, and from the actual performance of others in practice. So this stream examined a variety of products and practices which affect a building’s performance, and it brought everything together by looking at the lessons learned from buildings in use.
Never before have those working in construction and the built environment had to respond to so many new and revised standards. This stream dealt with the more understood as well as the emerging standards. It also explained the connections between them, and some of the tools and guides which are starting to become available to help designers and specifiers.
It is now an incontrovertible fact that refurbishment is the key to achieving a low carbon built environment. The majority of the buildings which exist today will still exist in 2050. For the UK to meet its targets and obligations on carbon emissions, this building stock will have to be refurbished and made much more efficient. This series of seminars took a wide ranging look at the challenge posed by refurbishment, examined the drivers for change, the commercial case, the practical issues involved, and the technical and materials solutions appropriate to different building types.
As a concise update and programme for planners, designers, managers and developers, this series of seminars explored the principles, policies, new research and practical ways of making more sustainable places. This ranges from visions of tomorrow’s cities, green infrastructure, transition towns, making space for food, better streets for people, designing for health and liveable microclimates, through to retrofitting green roofs, effective environmental design measures and the continued importance of trees.
Design affects everything. Every component, every product, every building. This stream addressed itself to a wide variety of design issues, each one of them to do with an aspect of sustainability, and each searching for the stimulating, the inspirational and the challenging.
This series of seminars examined several important markets for construction and built environment professionals. They are markets which are funded (in the UK mostly as part of the Government’s public capital expenditure programme), which are taking sustainability seriously (those in the UK are clearly subject to public procurement policies), and for the foreseeable future at least, present important opportunities for a sector which continues to feel the effects of the downturn.
In an incredibly short space of time, most of the stakeholders in construction have begun to change their approach and practices in response to an ever more pressing objective of designing and building ‘sustainably’. These seminars took a step away from the technical back office, and from building design and materials, and explored the wider context. How does construction sit in an holistic appraisal of a sustainable built environment, and a vision of a sustainable Britain?
As the market begins to grow, and as a variety of Government initiatives start to encourage the installation of micro renewable energy systems, this series of seminars and training sessions identified the business opportunity, explained the technologies, and described the business and commercial advantages of becoming trained and equipped to install and maintain micro generation systems.
The emergence of micro renewable energy systems, will transform the generation, heating and construction sectors in the next ten years – a transformation which will represent enormous opportunity and a need to change. This series of seminars and training sessions explained that change from a practical perspective. It provided an introduction to installing and maintaining the complete range of micro generation solutions, how to retrofit them and how to integrate them into existing buildings and systems.
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