Navigating an Evolving Sustainable Built Environment

Navigating an Evolving Sustainable Built Environment: Delivering Net Zero Carbon and Climate Resilience aims to provide an overview of sustainability practice in the built environment, drawing together the interrelated strands of sustainability policy and practice with reflections on past, current and future opportunities for practitioners. The book aims to empower and inspire readers to begin or strengthen their integration of purposeful sustainability into all aspects of their work. Framework thinking is introduced where the book seeks to inspire readers to begin or continue to develop their own path to purposeful integration of sustainability in their practice.

In this book, the authors assess evolution of the definitions of sustainability goals and matrices of measuring sustainability approaches in the built environment, and use a range of international leading examples across five continents of different scales to illustrate their implementations with details from the viewpoints of developers, designers and end users where possible, identifying their transformative impact. Three transformation capacities are used: Vision and Technology advancement, leading in Action and Governance to showcase each case study’s impact on sustainability transformation.

It provides an assessment of the emerging trends including climate adaptation, health and wellbeing, design for performance, net zero and circular economy and tools and processes that aim to accelerate the changes towards the end goals of sustainability. What does the future hold for us? The authors attempt to provide a synopsis of gazing to the future exploring the twin major forces of change, climate and AI and their impact on future living, future energy and indeed our humanity at end of this century. This book aims to show how we have got to this place in our journey and how we can begin to take the next steps with optimism and purpose.