Sustainable Construction - a Question of Attitude

By Werner Schandor - "As soon as a building exceeds the requirements for energy certification by a fraction, everyone immediately starts talking about a green building." Alexander Passer says and is not really satisfied. When Alexander Passer looks down on the building sites for Graz's future Smart City from his office on the 11th floor of the Science Tower Graz, he's not really satisfied: In the view of the professor of sustainable construction at TU Graz, much greater effort than that required to scrape above the target is needed to make building truly sustainable and climate-friendly. Models for achieving this will be the subject of discussions at the Sustainable Built Environment D'A-CH Conference 2019 to be held at TU Graz this September. The challenges have been obvious for some time: how can we use our planet's increasingly scarce resources so as to leave our descendants a suitable basis for their existence (i.e. sustainability)- And what do we have to do to keep anthropogenic or man-made global warming to a minimum and meet the targets of the Paris Agreement? A drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will be necessary. This is especially true for the construction sector, which accounts for around 40% of energy use and 50% of resource consumption worldwide.