Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/Global Enterprise and Sustainable Development (Ming Xu)/Sandbox UK green building council

Introduction
Sustainable Development is the incorporation of environmental and human needs in the pursuit of economic growth and development objectives. Now more than ever, the importance of sustainable infrastructure building is crucial. Oftentimes, some local planning authorities (LPAs) lack the resources to develop, execute, and implement sustainable building practices. UK Green Building Council proposes to develop the best practice guidance for developers and planners, aiding in the local government's resource gap

Formation
The organisation was founded in the autumn of 2006 and launched on February 2007 in response to the 2004 Sustainable Building Task Group Report, which called for the "advisory bodies concerned with sustainable buildings to be simplified and consolidated to provide a clear direction for industry".

Founding Members
AECOM, Aggregate Industries UK Ltd., Arup, Atelier Ten, Barratt Developments Plc, Bennetts Associates, BRE, British Land Company Plc, Canary Whart Groupd Plc, Colliers International, Ecobuild, Grimshaw & Partners Ltd., Halcrow Group, Hammerson UK Properties, Hanson Plc, Johnson Controls, Jones Lang LaSalle, Kingspan Group, Laing O’Rourke, Land Securities PLC, Lend Lease, Lloyds Banking Group, Marks & Spencer, Mott MacDonald, NG Bailey, NHBC, ProLogis Developments Ltd., PRP Architects, Schroders Plc, SEGRO, Sir Robert McAlpine Group, Stanhope Plc, Willmott Dixon Construction, WWF-UK.

Goals
The goal of the UK Green Building Council is to improve environmental sustainability by changing the way construction projects are planned, designed, constructed, maintained, and operated. The organization tries to offer clarity, cohesion and leadership to a disparate sector, and brings together anyone involved in the complex process of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining and operating buildings.

Other objectives
“Lead the industry in the development of a ‘Business Plan’ to cut carbon emissions from the UK built environment by 50% by 2020.” Program of Work, Next 3 Years: Three Core Areas
 * 1) Leading Industry Action- provide clarity and commitment to furthering the sustainability agenda in government, politics, and the media.
 * 2) Building Capacity- disseminate information and increase understanding to help better equip businesses/individuals for sustainable practices (STEP)
 * 3) Influencing Government Policy: Help ensure policies are based on the most up to date and reliable informationm facilitate a clear and simple policy framework for decarbonization of building stock- domestic & non-domestic, new & existing. Focal points of Policy Work include attempt to furbish existing stock, zero carbon new build, plan communities and infrastructure, and provide financial incentives for green implementers.

Registered Charity:
The UK Green Building Council is also a registered charity that works with its members, mostly businesses, but also NGOs, government agencies and academic institutions, in order to deliver radical change in the way homes and buildings are built for a more sustainable built environment. It is concerned with homes and non-domestic buildings, both new and existing, and the infrastructure that binds them together.

Challenges
All green building councils face similar challenges. On average, the built environment accounts for 40%-50% of natural resource use, 20% of water-use, 30%-40% of energy use, 60% of electricity use and ⅓ of CO2 emissions. It is the single largest contributor to human-made emissions in most countries. In the UK, for instance, 45% of total emissions come from buildings.

Building green buildings is the solution for the future because the construction and property sector is the forefront of finding solutions to climate change. However, the most criticized issue about constructing environmentally friendly buildings is the price. Photovoltaics, new appliances, and modern technologies tend to cost more money. Green building has risen rapidly in recent years, but that hasn’t translated into mainstream delivery. Good practice is the exception, not the norm. The UK Green Green Building Council has set a big goal for the coming three year period: to lead industry in the development of a ‘Business Plan’ to cut carbon emissions from the UK built environment by 50% by 2020.

27% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the energy used in our homes. . At least 80% of homes that will be standing in 2050 have already been built. Our existing homes have therefore got a huge role to play in ensuring our climate change targets are met and will need to be radically transformed in order to do so. For the UK Green building council, the current hindrance to ensuring our decisions deliver the best outcomes is a lack of readily available, robust and reliable data. This occurs right across the life-cycle of the built environment and the Campaign for Real Data will seek to tackle the problem wherever it occurs - from materials, to water, waste and more.

The problem of poor data is particularly acute in the case of CO2 emissions from existing non-domestic buildings, where current data is extremely inconsistent and incomplete. It is widely acknowledged that buildings in use will use considerably more energy than the model constructed during the design process suggests. It is therefore vital to add post-construction and post-occupancy data to the design stage data and to build up a comprehensive and powerful knowledge base of information at all three stages.

Structure
The UK Green Building Council (UK-GBC) is a membership organisation that is campaigning for a sustainable built environment – one that minimises negative environmental impacts while maximising benefits for people everywhere. Task groups: Task groups are time-limited collaborations of experts within the membership who come together on a specific issue in attempt to find solutions for issues getting in the way of making progress in any given industry. The groups are diverse in their members’ perspectives, and are an essential function for UK-GBC in operationalizing how to put their goals into practice. Task groups can be started by anyone who is a UK-GBC member, subject to approval by the organization. Once the group has been launched and gathered participants, each task group lays out some background for why they have been founded and what exactly their goals are. When the group is finished, it provides a list of key recommendations, which often have a direct influence on government policy and industry guidelines. Once a task group has succeeded in evaluating the given situation and coming up with their recommendations, the group is deemed “completed” and has no further obligations.

Below are the membership fees and benefits

Membership
The UK Green building Council has an extensive list of Founding, Golf Leaf, and Associate Members. The UK-GBC is part of a global network of like-minded organisations in almost 80 countries, through the World Green Building Council. The network facilitates engagement in international policy and programmes, including on-going work on common carbon metrics to improve comparability of building rating tools. Green Building Councils are emerging in countries all over the planet, and here are 16 formed Green Building Councils.


 * Argentina Green Building Council
 * Green_Building_Council_of_Australia
 * Green_Building_Council_Brasil
 * Canada_Green_Building_Council
 * http://www.emiratesgbc.org/egbc/
 * France Green Building Council
 * German Sustainable Building Council
 * Indian_Green_Building_Council
 * Japan Green Building Consortium
 * Mexico Green Building Council
 * http://www.nzgbc.org.nz/
 * http://www.gbcsa.org.za/home.php
 * http://www.taiwangbc.org.tw/
 * Romania_Green_Building_Council
 * United_States_Green_Building_Council
 * Vietnam_Green_Building_Council

Benefits

 * Demonstrate Leadership: By claiming membership in UK-GBC individuals and businesses can proclaim that they are serious about sustainability, and show commitment to making improvements regardless of their current sustainability status.
 * Promote yourself/your business:
 * Members have the right and are even encouraged to use UK-GBC’s logo which is good for image. UK-GBC also sponsors many PR opportunities for their members, starting with the posting of the company’s profile on the UK-GBC website. Companies who choose to further sponsor UK-GBC events further raise their profile.
 * Attend events: One of the benefits of membership in the UK-GBC is access to all kinds of events, including: technical seminars, topical debates, tours of exemplary green buildings, networking receptions.
 * Influence government policy/industry practice: Due to UK-GBC’s reputation as a reliable, knowledgeable group full of industry experts, recommendations made for government policy and industry practice are taken seriously and often have significant impact. Each member has the opportunity to have influence on a larger scale through participation in a task group or workshops that then go on to make recommendations.
 * Stay up to date: Involvement with UK-GBC means members get the advantage of knowing what UK-GBC knows. Updates on research, news, policy announcements, and key issues are provided to members on a weekly/daily basis. The website is also kept up to date with policy briefings and examples of best practices.
 * Help with own sustainability: Sustainability is a difficult thing to implement, and members have the immense benefit of access to UK-GBC’s reserves of information on tools and initiatives, best practices, and the value of green living.
 * Access to training and education: UK-GBC puts on a Sustainability Training and Education Program (STEP) which helps members learn and increase their capacity and abilities for implementing sustainability in their everyday decisions.
 * Be part of a global network
 * Gold Leaf Membership: Gold leaf members are available to organizations and businesses who want to be seen as taking an even more serious stance in the sustainability campaign. On top of regular member benefits, Gold Leaf members have access to Chief Executives and Trustees, even more events and seminars, and sponsorship opportunities. Gold Leaf members also get the chance to have the CEO of UK-GBC, Paul King, to speak at and endorse their events.

Progress & Successful programs
Campaign for Real Data

"The Campaign for Real Data's first priority is to ensure full, fast, and smooth roll-out of Energy Performance Certificates and Display Energy Certificates - to all non-domestic buildings - as a basis for making progress."
 * This campaign is based on the belief that sustainable solutions must build foundations for long-term success, and one problem currently getting in the way of this happening is the lack of reading available, reliable data. Current CO2 emissions data for non-domestic buildings is particularly inaccurate, inconsistent, and incomplete. This has to do with the fact that CO2 use models don't usually incorporate full life-cycle analyses, including post-construction and post occupancy data for buildings, into their assessments. The hope of this program is that better data and more accurate projections will enable regulations to be put into place that have higher real-world efficacy, and will hold up over time to successfully reduce emissions.

Great British Refurb Campaign
 * About 27% of UK’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the energy used in residential households . Therefore, existing households play a critical role in ensuring that the climate change targets are met. Radically transforming existing households is one of the only ways to ensure the climate change goals are met. The Great British Refurb campaign, greatly supported by the UK-Green Building Council, is a petition to the UK Government. The campaign is also supported by the Energy Saving Trust and World Wildlife Fund. The petition to the government calls for an eco-refurbish of residential households. In the summer of 2008, The UK-Green Building Council teamed with the Energy Efficiency Partnership for Homes to carry out a industry and stakeholder consultation on reducing carbon emissions in existing housing sock.

Criticisms
The UK-Green Building Council does not go far enough to radically transform the built environment. The UK-Green Building Council only provides coordination between businesses and seeks to make business adopt eco-friendly tactics in the form of petitions and memberships. However, this not create real change in the process of planning, constructing, maintaining, designing and operating the built environment. The UK-GBC has also recognized criticism on the legalities surrounding the architectural work on eco-friendly builidngs. It has been speculated that the architects that design structures in accordance with the UK-GBC guidelines will be held accountable for buildings that fail to perform in the future. They could be sued for negligence claims. UK-GBC chief Paul King addressed this issue by explaining that the architecture profession is going to have to step up to the challenge and prove themselves.

Associated Policies & Government Involvement
Lack of policy support: “UK-GBC Press Release on the Budget: Government's U turn on Zero Carbon is anti-green and anti-growth” The UK Green Building Council today criticised the Government's for overturning a policy that will require zero carbon homes, which will mean new homes from 2016 cannot source all their energy from carbon sources. UK-GBC chief executive Paul King said the policy u-turn revealed a shocking weakening of the government’s green agenda which would remove a valuable stimulus for low carbon growth.

Supporting Policy: The UK-GBC are supporting the Great British Refurb campaign, a Grand Designs campaign with Kevin McCloud, also supported by the Energy Saving Trust and WWF. At the heart of the campaign is a petition to the Government, calling for action to make it easier, more affordable and more attractive for people to eco-refurbish their homes.

List of References
    

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/feb/28/communities.society www.usgbc.org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=5961 http://www.ecobuild.co.uk/exhibitor-list/profile/231.html http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/daily-news/king-architects-could-be-sued-for-poor-performing-green-buildings/8616760.article http://blog.cat.org.uk/2011/09/23/12879/