Maidment is professor of heating and cooling at London South Bank University, and works part-time at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) on cooling research associated with the government Mission Innovation project. He reminded the symposium that 2023 was the warmest year ever and that, in the UK, a record temperature of 40.3ºC was reached.

Extreme heat has a much greater impact on those who are disadvantaged, said Maidment; in 2022, it led to 5,017 excess UK deaths among the over-70s. He explained that cooling isn’t just essential for comfort, but has many critical applications in other sectors, such as hospitals, preserving food and medicines, industrial processes, and data centres.

He showed projections from UN Global Cooling Watch that indicate dramatic rises in cooling demand and energy consumption of cooling over the next 25 years. Without action to promote sustainable cooling and adaptation, air conditioning and refrigeration could contribute half a degree to global warming, Maidment said.

Moving south

The symposium was shown how much more energy has been used for cooling in the UK in recent years, with Maidment explaining how the number of cooling degree days for Gatwick has increased to an average of 46 per year over the past four years, compared with 29 for the past 20 years. This is similar to Rouen, in France, meaning the Gatwick climate is moving 50 degrees south each year.

Two of Maidment’s DESNZ colleagues, lead technical energy adviser Melanie Jans-Singh and senior energy adviser André Neto-Bradley, described how buildings in their hometowns of Pau, France, and Porto, Portugal, respectively cope with warmer temperatures. Jans-Singh said nearly all windows had shutters and are wider apart, to allow them to be opened, and Neto-Bradley emphasised how building layouts are designed to minimise solar gain.

Jans-Singh said the UK government has been building up evidence on which to base future cooling strategy, and she shared a study on three cooling scenarios for a 4°C temperature rise by 2100. With no policy interventions, energy demand would quadruple and consumption double. The two other scenarios were if the government pursued a passive-first policy or increased use of efficient technologies. Each of these scenarios was costed: no intervention would cost £60bn, passive first £30bn, and more efficient technologies £75bn.

A mix of passive and active solutions would be required, said Jans-Singh, who went on to describe the Global Cooling Prize. This partnership between the UK government and the Rocky Mountain Institute encourages the development of more efficient air conditioning and some recipients have developed systems that are 10 times more efficient than current ones.

Global Cooling Pledge

Maidment spoke about the CSNow project, looking at the energy consumption and emissions from cooling in the UK in 2021. It found that 15% of all electricity is used for cooling, very close to a figure for Germany that was calculated for 2017. The per capita amount of kWh going into cooling for both countries for those years was near identical at 789/790. The full report will be published soon, said Maidment.

Adaptation will be key to mitigating the risks of a warming climate, added Neto-Bradley, and the UK Climate Change Committee has highlighted as a priority the risks to health from overheating buildings. He said the cooling team is working to support evidence-based action to address these risks, and gave details of the Global Cooling Pledge signed by 60 countries at COP28 last December, when nations committed to – among other things – more energy efficient systems, a phasing out of high global warm potential refrigerants, promoting passive-first approaches, and collaborating on innovation and research.

Unified outlook

Maidment ended the keynote by describing how the UK government is meeting one of its pledges to produce a strategic overview of cooling. It will take a sector-by-sector approach to gathering evidence and he is keen for CIBSE Members to join the initiative.

‘This unified outlook will be a chance to identify gaps and opportunities for sustainable cooling,’ he said. ‘We need to be fit for 2050 and beyond – and, to do that, we need a clearer plan of what we’re doing in the UK on cooling.’

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Apart from proposals for homes created through MCU, the package only addressed new buildings. There are currently no proposals for revising the regulations on works to existing buildings, which means that improvement opportunities continue to be missed when substantial works are carried out.

This adds to the government’s backtracking on minimum Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings in rented properties in late 2023.

The consultation did not address embodied carbon. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has been considering regulatory options on this for a couple of years. CIBSE continues to support the Part Z campaign², an industry-proposed amendment to Building Regulations, and the government should come forward with proposals as soon as possible.

Both of these omit huge parts of the building stock’s carbon emissions, on which the Climate Change Committee has urged action.

HEM, the replacement for SAP

The consultation introduces HEM, and HEM:FHS, as a replacement for the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP). HEM has added functionality and (hopefully) accuracy compared with SAP, but also added complexity and user inputs. A useful change is the distinction between the calculation methodology (= HEM), and the set assumptions and inputs to the calculation (= the FHS ‘wrapper’ – for example, the number of occupants and their activities). This paves the way for other useful applications – for example, wrappers for EPCs.

HEM could also be used outside of compliance calculations, with completely flexible inputs that would allow for the modelling of a home with its specific characteristics, such as number of occupants, heating patterns, and so on. 

Positive moves

There are a few positive elements in the FHS/FBS package: a clear move away from fossil fuels for heating and hot water in new domestic and non-domestic buildings, and more attention to post-completion testing. The latter should be welcome, even if the proposals are somewhat vague. CIBSE recommends examining the feasibility of a rating scale, based on tested performance, that could be used across the stock and support householders’ decisions for rental, purchase and retrofit, rather than for new-build homes only.

Another positive move is more requirements on homes created by MCU, including energy and carbon, airtightness testing, and Part O. This is welcome to protect householders, as homes created through permitted development rights are often sub-standard.

In large part, however, the proposals lack ambition and are a missed opportunity to create buildings that will deliver low energy use and good indoor environments, and not need future retrofits.

FHS and FBS

CIBSE repeated a number of comments made in previous consultations and supported by others, including LETI, RIBA and the Good Homes Alliance.

There is a need to review the approach to metrics and targets, to drive improvements and better relate to measurable, in-use performance.

Fabric and ventilation requirements should be more ambitious to deliver low space-heating demand and better air quality. The proposals for fabric in new-build homes were the least ambitious of the Future Homes Hub options, and less ambitious than in the 2021 consultation, despite 84% of respondents at the time recommending more ambition. 

The requirements for an ‘energy forecast’ for non-domestic buildings of more than 1,000m² can be met by methods that are not intended or suitable for it. This risks confusing designers and building owners, leading to work of little or no additional value being created. These forecasts should require energy performance modelling (for example, Passive House Planning Package, Nabers, or other methods in line with CIBSE TM54).

The FBS consultation acknowledged industry concerns about the National Calculation Methodology (NCM), including its tendency to underestimate space-heating demand (see the CIBSE-LETI response to the 2022 call for evidence³). However, the proposed changes seem very limited and insufficient.

A substantial review of the NCM should be carried out, so that the NCM better supports the implementation of energy efficiency measures in new and existing buildings.

Heat networks

The proposals came alongside the Heat Zoning consultation. CIBSE is concerned that the current proposals do not ensure that new-build networks offer a low carbon solution compared with onsite alternatives, or that they will drive the decarbonisation of existing networks. This is for a number of reasons, including the setting of the notional building when connected to a heat network, and the calculation methodology for carbon content of heat from networks.

References:

1. The Future Homes Standard (FHS), Future Buildings Standard (FBS), Part O, and homes created through material change of use (MCU), CIBSE consultation response, bit.ly/CJCIBFHS
2. The Home Energy Model (HEM) CIBSE consultation response, bit.ly/CJCIBSHEM, and Home Energy Model: Future Homes Standard Assessment CIBSE consultation response to its application to the FHS (HEM:FHS), bit.ly/CJCIBHSA
3. NCM Call for Evidence – Joint Submission by CIBSE and LETI
   bit.ly/3Uq8Tp9
4. ‘Zoning in: the new Heat Network Zoning consultation’, CIBSE Journal, April 2023, bit.ly/49ZPMa5
5. Part Z, part-z.uk
6. Consultation on the introduction of a UK carbon border adjustment mechanism, bit.ly/3QezmmX
7. City of London 2040 City Plan and Sustainability Supplementary Planning Guidance, bit.ly/3UkAY11

The post Glaring omissions: CIBSE response to building standards consultations appeared first on CIBSE Journal.

At last month’s Futurebuild conference at London’s ExCeL, CIBSE hosted a session on overheating in the built environment. Four speakers, on a panel chaired by CIBSE’s new research manager, Zoe De Grussa, covered overheating in care homes, the impact of new CIBSE Weather Files, and upcoming changes to CIBSE’s TM59: Design methodology for assessing overheating in homes.

Professor Rajat Gupta, from Oxford Brookes University, and Professor Anna Mavrogianni, from UCL Bartlett School Environment, Energy and Resources, shared findings from the ClimaCare: Climate resilience in care homes project (bit.ly/CCare2020).

After extensive monitoring of nearly 50 care homes in the UK, the project team found extensive overheating that was ‘pronounced and long’, according to co-investigator Gupta. He said that data from summer 2022 showed temperature peaks into the high 30s and median indoor temperatures of around 25°C. Temperatures during occupied hours in London care homes were 1.5 to 2.1°C higher than the rest of the country, he added.

Occupier surveys found that staff were much more sensitive to heat, with respondents saying they felt hot from 28-29°C, compared with residents, who said they felt hot when temperatures reached 32°C.

The project looked at interventions to reduce overheating and their effectiveness was quantified through building performance simulations, said Mavrogianni. It found that passive measures could suffice in care homes in the 2020s, when modelling predicted an increase of internal temperatures by 2°C. By 2050, however, air conditioning would be required to maintain thermal comfort, as modelling suggested 4°C temperature increases in care homes, said Mavrogianni, who added that – in a warmer climate – active cooling measures should be combined with passive ones to minimise cooling loads.

Construction age was a key indicator of overheating risk, with staff and residents in older, heavyweight buildings less likely to overheat in summer than those in modern, lightweight buildings, said Mavrogianni.

Hailun Xie, environmental data scientist with CIBSE and the University of Exeter, discussed the new CIBSE weather files, which are based on the latest Met Office climate data predications, UKCP18, and will be published later this year.  Two versions of the weather files have been created using UKCP18, with the second version aiming to better emulate extreme weather events.

Xie said modelling of a case-study flat in London found that overheating risks could increase significantly in future, with more frequent and intense heat events. The CIBSE weather files would be grouped by areas of similar climate, rather than geographical proximity, added Xie, who said a digital tool is being developed to improve weather data accessibility and allow long-term planning of future building energy systems.

Inkling founder Susie Diamond gave an update on TM59, which was adopted into Part O of the Building Regulations in 2021. She said the latest version would hopefully be included in the Future Homes Standard, due in 2025.

TM59 is a dynamic thermal modelling methodology that designers can use to meet Approved Document O, which requires mitigation against overheating. To comply with TM59, criteria must be met. Currently, temperatures in bedrooms from 10 pm to 7 am shall not exceed 26°C for more than 1% of annual hours. The proposed update is that the overheating criteria will be based on the number of summer nights where bedrooms exceed a night-time mean threshold temperature, and temperatures from 26°C to 28°C are being tested.

Other proposals are a new gain profile for home offices, the modelling of ceiling fans (with an algorithm based on the ASHRAE standard), and a night-time bedroom window opening profile. The team is also looking at allowing the modelling of open internal doors at night (but not bedroom doors).

Diamond said TM59 would be published in the summer and updated with the latest weather files. She hoped changes would be adopted by Part O.

For more information on TM59 and weather files, visit: bit.ly/CJTM59 and
www.cibse.org/weatherdata

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The China-UK Research and Innovation Forum, on the theme of ‘Urban built environments and thermal resilience under low carbon transition mode’, featured academics from Chinese and British universities. CIBSE was the only professional body invited to showcase its research on climate resilience. 

Experts from the UK included: Professor Tim Broyd, UCL; Professor Christopher Pain, Imperial College London; Professor Prashant Kumar, University of Surrey; Associate Professor Eugene Mohareb, University of Reading; and Visiting Professor Darren Woolf (chair of CIBSE’s Building Simulation Group) and Dr Katherine Roberts, both from the University of Cambridge.

The event was organised by professors Runming Yao and Baizhan Li, of Sustainable Development in the Building and Environment (SuDBE) at Chongqing University, the National Centre for International Research of Low carbon and Green Buildings, and the Joint International Research Laboratory of Green Building and Built Environments. 

I discussed the role of professional bodies in the translation and dissemination of academic research for industry and policy-makers. My presentation focused on the importance of climate adaptation, while also meeting net zero targets, in the design of buildings. I described the use of the adaptive comfort model (TM52) and CIBSE future weather profiles in the assessment of overheating in buildings.

Sustainable cooling

Other themes from the UK delegation included the role of AI in computational and data analysis to inform urban and building design decisions (Pain), the role of cross disciplinary collaborations, and the importance of systems design and whole life assessment (Broyd). 

The impact of green infrastructure on indoor and outdoor environments (Kumar) and retrofit decisions with occupant satisfaction and biodiversity in mind (Mohareb) were highlighted by UK experts. Woolf and Roberts discussed the role of natural ventilation and urban morphology in cities.

While the British experts discussed passive urban and building design solutions, the Chinese experts – perhaps not surprisingly – focused on sustainable cooling systems, such as reversible heat pumps and radiant panels (Professor Borong Lin, Tsinghua University), renewable technologies, and indoor and localised environmental controls. 

In a warming climate, the topic of sustainable cooling solutions will become more relevant in the coming years in the UK, and collaborations between the two countries could be beneficial. 

Chong Meng (director at China Academy of Building Research) presented the Chinese government’s Healthy China 2030 programme, which aims to improve public health outcomes by addressing challenges such as chronic and infectious diseases, and environmental health hazards. Professor Haidong Kan (Fudan University) looked at the impact of poor air quality and high temperatures on people’s health and productivity. He said higher accident rates, suicides and incidents of violence have been recorded as a result of higher temperatures.

On the second day of the forum, the SuDBE team ran a workshop on building resilience. The most effective solutions suggested by the joint panel to address urban-scale thermal resilience were: blue-green infrastructure; reflective material/cool roofs; urban morphology to enable urban ventilation; human behaviour/adaptation and cultural changes; and resilient infrastructure.

The solutions to address building-scale thermal resilience were split between the two groups with the UK group suggesting: passive design; whole-life thinking; energy demand management and renewable generation; and occupant behaviour and education.

The Chinese group came up with: passive design; active design: controls/system design/system efficiency; renewable energy and electricity storage/local use. The two-day event established an international network of experts, encouraged the open exchange of ideas, and generated a lot of possibilities for further collaborations. The group will work together to put forward projects, and CIBSE will benefit from the research produced by these collaborations, to develop guidance and tools for its members and the wider industry.

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With the current 1.1^oC of global temperature rise, changes to the climate system are now occurring in every region of the world, with rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and rapidly disappearing sea ice. Even if we managed to reduce our global emissions to zero tomorrow, we are already destined for a certain level of climate change –because of the GHG emissions already released into the atmosphere – by the middle of this century. 

What the above is clearly telling us is that, while we are committed to reducing our carbon emissions towards a net zero future, it’s imperative that we also build resilience in all sectors of human activity, including the built environment, where most of us spend most of our lives. 

The main areas in which climate change will impact the built environment are thermal comfort and energy use, structural integrity, and water management. Warmer winters may reduce the need for heating, but keeping cool in summer without increasing energy use will present a key challenge. The industry will also have to address the impact of extreme storms and having too much water (floods) and too little (droughts). 

CIBSE tools and resources are widely used by policy and industry to inform adaptation strategies. For example, in 2022, CIBSE’s TM59 Design methodology for the assessment of overheating risk in homes was introduced as one of the methods to show compliance with the Building Regulations on overheating in England: Approved Document O. 

For the first time, the requirement to increase the resilience of buildings (new homes) to the impacts of a changing climate (increasing temperatures) was introduced in national policy (in England). 

TM59 provides a consistent methodology to assess overheating. It standardises occupancy profiles, internal gains, the treatment of blinds and shading, and the use of weather profiles. 

CIBSE is in the process of revising TM59 to coincide with the release of the Future Homes Standard, currently under public consultation. As part of the process, the authoring team debated the use of future weather (2020s: 2011-40) against historic weather profiles (1983-2013) in the assessment of overheating, to allow for mitigation solutions that would work both now and in the future. 

As the life expectancy of an average home is at least 100 years, it has been decided that a future weather profile should be required to investigate the thermal performance of domestic properties. 

Design Summer Years

CIBSE’s Design Summer Years (DSY) are annual weather profiles selected to represent three types of hot event: DSY1 – moderately warm summer; DSY2 – short, intense warm spell; DSY3 – long, less-intense warm spell.

DSYs are available for 14 locations in the UK, and there are two extra DSYs for London to capture the intensity of the urban heat island. The DSYs are also available for three future timelines: 2020s (2011-40), 2050s (2041-70) and 2080s (2071-2100), based on the UK Climate Projections 2009. CIBSE is now revising DSYs based on the latest UK Climate Projections released in 2018.  

The revision of TM59 is focusing on two key elements: the revision of the night-time criterion and the implementation of the 2050s DSY1 as the minimum required weather profile to assess overheating in homes. 

Existing studies have shown that the current criterion overestimates the risk of overheating (Lomas et al, BSER&T, 2023). The current UK bedroom threshold of 26°C is based on one small study, which is now more than 45 years old. 

CIBSE is working with 20 organisations from industry and academia to look at a higher threshold. Early results have shown that the relaxation of the night-time criterion will better represent the risk of overheating and the effectiveness of mitigation options in the future.

While increasing the challenge presented by the warmer 2050s weather profile, overall it shows similar levels of overheating as the current TM59 methodology. 

There is still a lot to be done to adapt our buildings to the rising temperatures and extreme hot events. We need to better understand the comfort and health thresholds of vulnerable people. We also need to promote more sustainable cooling systems (reversible heat pumps might be a solution), especially for homes, to avoid the mass uptake of air conditioning, which will undermine our carbon-reduction efforts. 

Lastly, but most importantly, we need to focus on making our cities greener; if we tackle increasing temperatures and heatwaves at city level, then our homes and buildings will be less vulnerable to such weather events.

The post A proactive approach in a warming climate appeared first on CIBSE Journal.

COP28 provided an impressive platform for a vast range of stakeholders – from scientists, policy-makers, energy companies and experts, to non-governmental organisations and groups representing marginalised communities. 

In the various halls and meeting rooms, I found there was universal agreement for the need to limit global warming, but also disagreement about how to achieve this. It was an overwhelming experience, as there was so much to take stock of, and much to be gained from dialogue with others.

Triple crises

Several speakers at COP28 highlighted the triple crises the planet is facing: climate change, global pollution, and biodiversity loss. There is an international perspective to this, as pointed out in various talks, with representatives from some regions highlighting how they are particularly affected. 

Indigenous communities in South America emphasised the continued deforestation on their continent, with consequences for their traditional lifestyles and loss of animal and plant species. Meanwhile, among African countries, representatives from Nigeria outlined how oil extraction has caused land, water and air pollution that is detrimentally impacting local agriculture and businesses.

The role of nature in mitigating the climate crisis was the topic of a session with Professor Nathalie Seddon, director of the Nature-based Solutions Initiative in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, and Dr Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England. 

Ashley Bateson (left) with author of the Independent Review of Net Zero, Chris Skidmore and journalist Terry Slavin (right)

Seddon said that not only can increasing biodiversity improve microclimatic conditions and climate adaptation, but green infrastructure can also provide co-benefits for people’s mental and physical health. Juniper added that more needed to be done to reconnect Western societies with nature and said education could raise appreciation of the benefits of incorporating nature into developments. 

At other sessions, representatives from banking, pensions and insurance funds acknowledged that more needs to be done in the finance sector to decarbonise investments, set objectives to support sustainable development, and assign metrics for assessing climate resilience. 

Scientists stated that, while adaptation is about the need to design interventions to cope with climate impacts – such as overheating and flooding – building resilience requires a broader appreciation of how to anticipate and recover from severe climate impacts.

The energy transition

At a fringe event arranged by UK-focused organisations, Sir Alok Sharma MP, president for COP26 in Glasgow, emphasised the need for nations to keep alive the ambition to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – the Paris Agreement signed by more than 190 countries in 2016. 

Sir Alok said the latest analysis shows that the world has already exceeded an average 1.1ºC temperature increase above pre-industrial levels. Global energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, with a risk that we may exceed 2ºC if further policy interventions are not implemented. 

There are, however, positive indicators of progress in some areas of the energy transition to zero carbon emissions. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), significant improvements have been made in renewable energy generation growth. Around 30% of the world’s electricity production is now generated from renewable energy sources and 85% of new capacity being built is renewable. 

In some parts of the world, the uptake of renewable energy generation has been particularly high. There are times, for example, when 100% of electricity demand in Denmark is met by wind, and spells when energy-hungry California gets more than 95% of its power from wind and solar. Significant progress has been made in the UK to decarbonise the Grid, with more than 40% of annual electricity consumption coming from renewables.

From a built environment and industry perspective, Sir Alok reinforced the IEA recommendation that the pace of energy efficiency improvements needs to double, to approximately 5% demand reduction each year. The IEA believes there is an important role for the finance sector in decarbonisation and is calling for ‘innovative, large-scale financing mechanisms to support low carbon investments’.

At another session, hosted by the UK Green Building Council, MP Chris Skidmore, lead author of the government’s Independent review of net zero, celebrated the launch of the Buildings Breakthrough.

This is a new pledge from more than 27 countries to make net zero and resilient buildings the new norm by 2030. These countries – which include the USA, China, the UK, France, Morocco and Japan – are collectively responsible for half of the world’s emissions. The details of the pledge are yet to be defined, but they will be developed over the coming months.

Personal takeaways

From a personal perspective, I have three key takeaways from COP28. First, the need for our sector to embrace performance-based design, with a focus on net zero carbon outcomes. At the end of COP28, there was a global agreement to ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels. As engineers, we should aim to eliminate fossil fuels from the built environment as soon as possible. 

Second, we need a broader appreciation of the stakeholders affected by our projects, so we can better understand how our buildings impact people and the environment. 

Finally, we need to design for climate-change resilience. This includes incorporating nature-based solutions and increasing biodiversity in developments. This will not only reduce temperatures and mitigate flood impacts, but it will also enhance wellbeing and make the future planet more habitable. 

• Ashley Bateson FCIBSE is director at Hoare Lea

To read about CIBSE at COP28 go to …

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For the first time, the event will incorporate Light2Perform, with an extensive programme curated by the Society of Light and Lighting (SLL) and the Lighting Industry Association. Also co-locating with Build2Perform Live is the Chartered Association of Building Engineers’ (CABE’s) Built Environment LIVE, which has themes of performance, compliance and safety.

A CIBSE-accredited CPD programme will run alongside Build2Perform. Curated by CIBSE Divisions and Special Interest Groups, and the Build2Perform Live advisory committee, it will feature invited specialist speakers from across the built environment.

Build2Perform’s key themes this year are heating for net zero, climate adaptation, electrical services, smart technology, building safety, and health and wellbeing. 

Net zero, safety and overheating

The keynote session on day one will discuss how the UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard will impact environmental design. This will be followed by an session on virtual, augmented and virtual realities, which will delve into artificial intelligence and discuss the benefits and pitfalls of handing building control to the machines. 

Representatives of the government and the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) will explain how the Building Safety Act is revolutionising the way buildings are procured, designed and maintained. Building safety is also the theme of a session organised by the Society of Façade Engineering. 

Thermal comfort is key to health and wellbeing, and Build2Perform will feature a session on the latest research and industry developments in assessing overheating in buildings. Speakers include Kevin Lomas, Susie Diamond and Becci Taylor. 

On day two, the keynote will cover CIBSE’s TM65: Embodied energy in building services, and look at TM65 guides specifically for Middle Eastern and North American regions. 

Winners of the annual Society of Digital Engineering Awards will also be announced at Build2Perform. 

The CIBSE Resilient Cities Group is hosting a seminar on advances in urban digital planning and modelling for climate-resilient and healthy cities, and other sessions will look at indoor air quality and guidance on avoiding mould and damp. 

In the CPD theatre, the CIBSE Lifts Group, with Adam Scott, will present on the whole life carbon of lifts, while Nick Mellor, of the Lift and Escalator Industry Association, will discuss building safety and the evacuation and use of lifts by firefighters.

Light2Perform

Key themes of Light2Perform include emergency lighting, external lighting, dark skies light pollution, decarbonisation, health and wellbeing, regulation, and sustainability. 

The conference will feature the launch of LG7 Lighting for offices and LG14 Control of electric lighting, and the Young Lighter of the Year competition will be announced.

Light2Perform’s technical programme will cover ever-tighter eco-design requirements and the challenge of reducing embodied carbon, and has been organised by leading lighters Bob Bohannon, Sophie Parry and current SLL president Helen Loomes.

The BSR’s deputy chief inspector of buildings, Chris Griffin-McTiernan, will give a keynote at Build2Perform Live, and there will be sessions on fire safety, new-build housing quality, building retrofits, and zero carbon building performance.

The event is a fantastic opportunity to network and be on top of all the huge changes happening in building services as we strive for net zero and building safety. The Journal hopes to see you there.

Featured Exhibitors:

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Many consultants in the built environment – including engineers, architects, project managers and landscape architects – have signed up to the international declaration of the climate and biodiversity emergency.¹ In the UK alone, more than 120 companies have joined the Building Services Engineers Climate and Biodiversity Emergency Declaration.² This is a commitment to collaborate, share knowledge and advocate increased resource efficiency on projects and more regenerative design principles.

The importance of biodiversity has not come under the same spotlight as decarbonisation, but we are on the cusp of change. At the World Economic Forum in 2020, a new global ambition was born: ‘nature positive by 2030’. This is viewed as the biodiversity equivalent of the Paris Climate agreement. A driving force behind this shift in focus is nature’s unprecedented freefall; since 1970, the relative abundance of monitored wildlife populations has declined by 69%. This figure was 60% five years ago.³

The need for designers to be more aware of the role of protecting and incorporating nature in building development was also recognised at a recent annual conference of the UK Building Services Engineers Climate and Biodiversity Emergency .⁴

The need to protect and restore biodiversity

Over their lifetime, nature-based solutions actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere

At the most basic level of reasoning, nature must be protected and restored because it is fundamental to our survival. Our natural world provides the clean air, food and water we need to thrive; it enhances our wellbeing and reduces threats of zoonotic diseases.

Nature’s services to us – otherwise known as ecosystem services – are near infinite, and include everything from climate regulation, pollution reduction, medicinal plants, construction materials, and eco-tourism.

In the UK built environment, a radical transformation is under way to revalue nature. This is, in part, spurred by national regulations that, from November 2023, will require all developments under the Town and Country Planning Act to create a 10% biodiversity net gain – something that many local authorities already require to be exceeded. (Small sites will have to meet the target in April 2024).

This legal mandate is encouraging developers and asset owners to seek out the multifunctional benefits associated with nature. Beyond planning requirements, organisations have, since May 2023, been able to set science-based targets for nature, similar to their carbon equivalent. This approach gives companies a clear structure to protect and restore nature in line with science.

Green infrastructure

Nature-based solutions provide green infrastructure such as green walls, biodiverse roofs, gardens, parks, and sustainable urban drainage systems, which have social, economic and environmental benefits. To date, engineers haven’t fully incorporated these solutions in their toolboxes, but – if used at scale – they offer a means of reducing the risks of the climate and biodiversity emergencies.

As building solutions, they not only have a low – or, in some cases, negative – embodied carbon impact, but over their lifetime actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Furthermore, focusing on nature-based solutions results in an uplift to site biodiversity.

Modern developments typically target a wide spectrum of outcomes to ensure they deliver against various stakeholder expectations. Because of their diverse range of benefits, nature-based solutions are becoming an increasingly more cost-effective way to deliver on these priorities.

Green roofs are an increasingly common nature-based solution, particularly in urban areas with scarce space. 1 New Street Square, London, the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) HQ in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, and the University of Greenwich Library are examples of developments that have embraced green roofs as part of their design. In addition to their basic function of providing shelter, these roofs are outcompeting their traditional alternatives by improving building performance and occupant experience.

One significant benefit of a green roof is its ability to alleviate some of the urban heat island affect by shading heat-storing hard surfaces and absorbing solar radiation through evaporation and evapotranspiration. This reduces internal and external air temperature by, on average, 4K and 1K respectively. Green roofs can also, on average, reduce noise by 11dB, increase property value by 6.9% and store 73% of rainwater runoff.

The biodiverse roof terrace at 1 New Street Square, in the city of London, provides microclimate and biophilic benefits for the occupants of this office building for Deloitte

Quantifying nature’s value

Nature’s economic, environmental and social value has historically been hard to quantify. For this reason, nature has struggled to be fully used in building design. An ambitious masterplan in west London is being used as a test bed for creating an approach to help quantify the value of a landscape-led development.

For this, a Defra Natural Capital Tool has been produced, using data from a meta-study of scientific papers to build a value profile for each nature-based solution type. These profiles enable landscape strategies to be appraised on how they contribute to the attainment of the development’s sustainability targets, business priorities and wider value creation. The aim is to influence and support decisions around landscaping design based on the desired attributes being sought.

Take a typical masterplan containing a busy high street with lots of pedestrians and road noise, for example. Priorities might include reducing the risk of pedestrians overheating in summer, decreasing noise pollution for building occupants, and avoiding flood risk. The tool could be used to identify the mix of nature-based solutions to optimise delivery against these priorities. For instance, it would identify that trees, on average, reduce air temperature by 3K, can absorb 4dB of sound, and reduce rainwater runoff by 43%. Trees also contribute to net zero targets by sequestering carbon, and help attract retail tenants by increasing people’s willingness to spend in local businesses by 30%.

Nature-based solutions can also return financial value. Last year, the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) released a report that outlines how nature-based solutions can be the basis for financial benefits and new revenue streams.⁵

Takeaway

Nature-based solutions can be viewed by engineers as an extension to their toolbox of approaches. In practice, they will probably require new cross-discipline working partnerships, to tap into the expertise of landscape architects, ecologists and sustainability consultants to apply solutions to real-world projects.

• Robert Winch is a senior consultant and Ashley Bateson a director, both at Hoare Lea, and Chin Chen is a senior associate at Grant Associates.

References:

1. www.builtenvironmentdeclares.com
2. www.buildingservicesengineersdeclare.com
3. Almond R E A, Grooten M, Juffe Bignoli D and Petersen T, Living Planet Report 2022 – Building a nature positive society, WWF, Switzerland
4. www.linkedin.com/company/uk-building-services-engineers-declare
5. The value of urban nature-based solutions, UKGBC, May 2022, bit.ly/CJNatUKGBC

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Despite a damper September, two new reservoirs are being considered in Cambridgeshire and South Lincolnshire to provide water for 750,000 homes and help secure the region’s water supplies. Multiple water companies are reportedly also considering further drought measures. Emerging from this is a new concept for local authorities, developers and planners – water neutrality. 

Water neutrality is, essentially, the idea of water use in the area of a new development being equal to, or lower than, the previous total water use: that is, where water abstraction is not above the area’s existing levels. 

Many considerations need to be factored in when it comes to water neutrality. While existing measures can help improve the water efficiency of a site, more needs to be done to incorporate the idea of water neutrality into the planning stages of a development, especially as water abstraction can have an impact on the surrounding area, including the wildlife. 

Additionally, where drinking water is provided to a development by the local trunk mains, connecting larger developments to existing infrastructure needs to be assessed carefully to mitigate any adverse effects of a potential increase in water abstraction.

Achieving water neutrality

The reality is that water neutrality is far from simple to achieve. Setting stricter regulations could add an incentive for water neutrality to be planned into a project, but we cannot be too restrictive at this stage. 

Current Part G Building Regulations set a mandatory daily consumption of 125 litres per capita for new builds, which is a relatively easy goal to achieve. However, a more ambitious target of 80 litres per capita would require very strict measures. Currently, improving water efficiency is costly, and not all technologies are readily available or suitable for some developments.

Water neutrality may seem a distant goal, but steps to improve efficiency can still be taken, and there are a number of ways we can reduce a site’s water consumption.

Water efficiency techniques

‘Simple’ measures that can be easily implemented to improve the water efficiency of a development, including smart meters, flow restrictors and low-flush toilets. However, these alone cannot achieve the reductions required for water neutrality, or even a consumption figure close to it. As such, some developers may wish to consider reclaimed water technologies for their sites.

Rainwater, for example, can be harvested for re-use in the building for flushing toilets and irrigation (RWH), or greywater can be reclaimed from wash basins, showers and baths (GWH) before being filtered and treated, and passing into a clear-water storage tank. Strategically designed site-wide strategies may provide the greatest benefit to developers by linking the sustainable drainage system features to active/hybrid RWH/GWH systems.

Reclaimed water systems offer the greatest water-saving benefits, reducing stress on aquifers from over-abstraction, and reducing mains water costs. However, the equipment required for these systems can come at an increased cost for implementation and maintenance, so thought should be given to which measures are the most effective for each site.

The wider picture

The UK’s climate is changing and our summers are becoming drier. Water consumption and the idea of water neutrality will become an increasing focus for many stakeholders – it is only a matter of time before best practice is embedded in legislation as further water-consumption technologies are invented. 

At this stage, however, we should not be aiming for ‘net zero’ water. First, we need to better understand water demand and usage in prospective developments, and work to reduce demand in existing properties by offsetting, providing there is local stock against which to create the offset. 

Greater scrutiny of water efficiency is on the horizon, so stakeholders should take steps now to reduce a site’s consumption. Developing greater understanding of the available technologies and existing research, and embedding the water-saving methods best suited to a site, will help. If we take one lesson from this summer, it is that we must all start making that difference now.

About the author
Rickesh Miyangar is a director at Rambol

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Creating net zero carbon buildings will be at the forefront of building engineers’ minds in 2022. The stark evidence of climate change means there is no time to lose, and the construction industry has the will and the ingenuity to deliver buildings that leave no carbon trace. In the UK, the threat of climate change has coalesced once-disparate views, and now the only question is how quickly we accelerate towards the Future Homes and Buildings Standard¹, which aims to make all buildings ‘net zero ready’ from 2025.

Energy reduction should not be the only priority over the next 12 months, however. Attention should also be paid to health, safety and wellbeing, not only in the way we keep occupants safe from the virus, but also in how we ensure buildings that put lives at risk are never designed. The next year will be an opportunity for engineers to ensure their competencies are in line with what will be required under the Building Safety Bill² – these competencies will be required for all buildings.

The ultra-contagious Omicron variant of Covid-19 has been a jolt for those who thought the virus had been neutralised by vaccination and increased immunity. There will be no room for complacency in 2022, and attention will turn to difficult-to-ventilate buildings. 

Net zero carbon and health, wellbeing and safety are two of CIBSE’s Knowledge and Research Priorities³, with the others being: circular economy; climate adaptation; digital engineering; retrofit and refurbishment; and
smart buildings. 

Simon Wyatt, a partner at Cundall and chair of the CIBSE Knowledge Generation Panel, says CIBSE’s five Covid-19 guidance documents were downloaded almost 40,000 times in 2021. These didn’t just focus on ventilation, but also on lifts and escalators, and public health engineering issues. ‘The rate of publication has been remarkable,’ he says. 

CIBSE’s publication diary for 2022 shows a plethora of relevant guides around the net zero revolution. AM17 Heat pumps for non-domestic buildings follows hot on the heels of the housing equivalent, AM16, while TM65.1 and TM65.2 add much-needed embodied energy data on building services systems. 

Wyatt believes there will be an increase in clients’ interest in the operational energy use of their buildings in 2022. CIBSE’s TM54 Operational energy performance guidance enables designers to calculate predicted in-operation energy use and compare it against buildings’ actual energy use, allowing building managers to identify performance gaps. A revised TM54 will be published in 2022.

The lack of mandatory operational assessments in Conservation of fuel and power: Approved Document L⁴, published last month, was lamented by Wyatt. In the draft document, it was mooted that large buildings would be required to assess operational energy by using TM54 or other modelling methodologies, such as the Passivhaus Planning Package. ‘The big missed opportunity is that a significant proportion of the market will develop buildings without any clue of the operational energy use,’ says Wyatt, who adds that the success of the Nabers energy rating system in Australia, where energy use in buildings has been reduced by 70%, shows what can be achieved by predicting energy use. 

Ed Wealend, head of research and innovation at Cundall, says a new generation of developers in the UK is using the Design for Performance (DfP)⁵ initiative, which is based on Nabers, and that London property firms are keen to get the first DfP-rated building. ‘A bit of healthy competition is good way to drive the market,’ he adds.

A visual of the retrofitted HQ of the Cambridge Institue for Sustainability Leadership

Nathan Millar, sustainability principal at Elementa Consulting, has also seen an acceleration in interest in zero carbon and decarbonisation, and expects it to start becoming the norm in 2022. ‘We’re seeing clients of all sizes, from the public and private sectors, trying to find the best route to net zero,’ says Millar, who believes one of the big drivers is access to green funding. ‘Developers need to clearly articulate the energy use of their buildings to investors,’ he adds.

Time to define

How net zero is defined should become clearer in 2022. Last year, LETI supported by CIBSE, RIBA and the Whole Life Carbon Network produced a set of definitions that included operational and whole-life carbon⁶. Last month, CIBSE and LETI carried out an industry survey, What does zero carbon mean?, and will be publishing FAQs on a net zero definition in early 2022, which CIBSE, potentially, will adopt.

‘It’s about getting clarity on the details of terminology so there is no greenwashing,’ says Clara Bagenal George MCIBSE, associate at Elementa Consulting and co-founder of LETI. 

With its inclusion in net carbon definitions, interest in embodied energy will continue to grow this year. In 2020, CIBSE published TM65 Embodied carbon in building services, which provided a methodology for calculating embodied carbon for building services products. Manufacturers were also encouraged to share data on the embodied energy in their products and, as a result, CIBSE produced TM65.1 Embodied carbon of residential heating. TM65.2 will be the equivalent for offices and will be published early in 2022.

‘TM65 was important and we’ve seen that being rolled out globally,’ says Millar. ‘TM65.2 is the next piece of the jigsaw. Suppliers will follow a similar methodology and approach to calculating embodied carbon, so we can have confidence about their equipment and material.’

Cundall’s Wyatt believes more local authorities will follow the lead in the London Plan, which requires developers to calculate and reduce whole life-cycle emissions for planning permissions referred to the Mayor (and encourages it on all major developments). ‘TM65 has been a gamechanger,’ he adds. ‘There’s now no excuse for us to not ask for EPDs [environmental product declarations] from manufacturers.’

AC units could be reused or repurposed in a circular economy

Wyatt and Millar both predict that the circular economy will gain traction in 2022, with audits determining what can be reused or repurposed in existing buildings. 

The publication of TM66 – Creating a circular economy in the lighting industry in November is an invaluable addition to the body of guidance in this area. 

The inclusion of embodied energy in whole-life carbon assessments will drive the retrofit of more buildings, such as the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership’s Entopia Building (left), which was previously a telephone exchange. LETI published the Climate Emergency Retrofit Guide⁷ and, in 2022, will be working with CIBSE on a version for non-domestic buildings. 

Staying Covid-secure

Covid will still loom large in 2022. ‘There has been a bit of complacency over the past six months because the vaccine was seen to be controlling Covid,’ says Wealend, who is chair of the CIBSE clean air working group and co-author of Covid-19: Air cleaning technologies.

He says the focus is now on schools, which have been a larger driver of community transmission. A study by Leeds University on the effectiveness of standalone Hepa filters and ultraviolet (UV) air cleaning units in 30 schools will be published in the spring, which will help the Department for Education determine whether schools need a strategy beyond opening windows to flush out any virus. 

Covid has led to an ‘uptick’ in people wanting to monitor indoor air quality, adds Wealend, who is an Approved Person for Reset, a Chinese certification body for indoor air quality. AirRated is the UK equivalent. ‘We had no interest in Reset until Covid came along,’ he says. ‘My initial impression was that it wasn’t necessary in the UK, but having reviewed the data of five to six buildings, I have changed my mind.’

A safe new year

In her Independent review of Building Regulations and fire safety, Dame Judith Hackitt identified four major areas that she believes contributed to the Grenfell Tower disaster: ignorance, indifference, lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities, and inadequate regulatory oversight and enforcement.

In response to the report, the government introduced the Fire Safety Act in April 2021 and the Building Safety Bill, which is expected to receive Royal Assent in mid-2022. Among the requirements of the Fire Safety Act, owners and managers of multi-occupied residential buildings have to examine external walls and doors as part of a fire risk assessment. 

The Building Safety Bill is more relevant for engineers. It requires owners of high-rise residential buildings to manage the safety risk and ensure that those planning, designing, constructing and maintaining a building take responsibility for fire safety.

The bill also establishes the role of building safety regulator (BSR), which will operate within the Health and Safety Executive and oversee design, and construction of all buildings, and also occupation of high-risk buildings. Importantly for engineering professionals, the BSR will set new competence requirements for work on all buildings, which engineers will have to be aware of in 2022.

New competence regulations

The Draft Building (Appointment of Persons, Industry Competence and Dutyholders) Regulations, contained in the bill, require everyone working on buildings, and employers, to assess competence and demonstrate it to clients and regulators. There are three dutyholder roles – principal designer, principal contractor, and building safety manager. Clients have statutory responsibilities under the dutyholder regs for the appointment of all the designers, contractors including the principals.

The dutyholders will need to work together to plan, manage and monitor the design and building work, and have systems in place to ensure they comply with relevant building regulations. These new roles mean responsibility is being placed on clients and designers and contractors, said Hywel Davies at CIBSE’s online Build2Perform conference. ‘It’s for clients to take all reasonable steps to satisfy themselves about the competence of those they propose to appoint,’ he added.

There will also be a duty on designers and contractors to be satisfied they are accepting an appointment that they are competent to undertake, with penalties for those who take on work they are not competent to do. ‘This is a significant shift of responsibility, and it’s very much falling to industry and clients,’ said Davies.

The bill also states that occupied higher-risk buildings must have at least one clearly identifiable accountable person, known as the principal accountable person. They will be responsible for appointing a building safety manager, who will coordinate the management and oversight of building safety risks. 

To support the bill, the Competency Steering Group (CSG) was formed to work with the what is now the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and industry to define competency standards. The government is working with the CSG to develop a competency framework and specification for building safety managers, which it plans to publish in 2022 as part of a suite of competency standards. ‘Dame Judith made it clear that the industry needed to change, and that our standards of compliance had fallen and we needed to address those,’ said George Adams, chair of Working Group 1 – Engineers (one of 12 sections of the CSG). 

The group’s core activity was to examine competency in the industry and how it could be improved. As part of this, it looked at Annex 1G – UK-SPEC, which focuses on how competency is measured for professional engineers working on any building. 

In its report, the group proposed the need for a ‘lead engineer’, who would support the principal designer, principal contractor and building safety manager. A dutyholder can also be a lead engineer. An additional compliance requirement will be necessary for professional engineers who want to practise in the area of higher-risk buildings.

CIBSE is working with the Engineering Council to enhance the current UK-SPEC for contextualised registration, says Vince Arnold, CIBSE board member and trustee: ‘CIBSE members are involved in writing the enhanced competence requirements for building services, fire and structural [including façade] within working groups. If you become a contextualised registered engineer, you will face revalidation, expected to be every five years, by interview or submission of portfolio that gives evidence of your skills, knowledge, behaviours and experience in the field of higher-risk buildings.’

Working Group 1 will now develop an initial training workshop for end users on how they can roll out their own methodology of safety case process and report, says Adams, who adds that it is important for members to plan their CPD for 2022. ‘If you want to practice within the world of higher-risk buildings, your CPD will have to change to support the requirements, to show you are up to speed with safety in that area of our industry.’

References:

CIBSE guides are at www.cibse.org/Knowledge/Guides. Covid-19 guidance is free to non-Members

1. The Future Buildings Standard, accessed Dec 21
2. Building Safety Bill, accessed Dec 21, 
3. CIBSE Knowledge and Research Priorities 
4. Conservation of fuel and power: Approved Document, Dec 21 L bit.ly/CJJan22Pre4
5. Design for Performance initiative, Better Building Partnership. 
6. LETI net zero carbon definitions, 
7. Climate Emergency Retrofit Guide, LETI

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