Buildings threaten UK emission targets, report says

The Royal Academy of Engineering report lays out a groundwork for reducing the environmental impact of new buildings as well as refurbishment of old ones.

It added there was a serious skills gap in the sector that could grow worse.

The report, called Engineering a Low Carbon Built Environment said that many building principles, such as those that retain heat in a building or make good use of natural light, were known to the Romans but are still not being implemented in modern buildings as much as they could be.

The field of “building engineering physics”, which draws on old ideas and new, can address the issue. But the report warns that both the industry and academia are so far failing to produce engineers who can apply the concepts

Contrastingly, Professor King railed against what he termed “eco-bling” – the tendency for many new building projects to fail to reduce their overall energy consumption and then tack on energy generation schemes such as wind turbines or solar panels in a high-visibility effort to make up for some of the wasted energy.

BBC