Combating Climate Change by Natural Building

NEES 2 Proposal Natural Energy Efficiency and Sustainability 2

Cork Centre for Architectural Education 03.12.15

José OspinaProject ManagerJose.ospina@neesonline.org

Victim of Climate Change?

According to Norway's The Local, Stirling believes the bear starved to death as a result of a lack of sea ice, which the animals use as a platform for hunting seals.

NEES Mission

Identify and promote products and services that improve energy efficiency in existing domestic buildings, that make use primarily of renewable or recycled materials and of services based on natural processes, which originate or are normally accessible in the Northern Periphery Programme Region, and have the potential for being mainstreamed and commercially disseminated inside and outside the region.

NEES Work Programme 2011 - 2014

WP1 – Project Management – Cork Centre for Architectural Education (CCAE), Ireland

WP2 – Determining Products, Services, Opportunities and Barriers – Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), Scotland.

WP3 – Benchmarking Best Practices – University of Umea, Sweden.

WP4 – Exchange of Best Practices and Long Term Strategy – University of Ulster, Northern Ireland.

WP5 – Pilot Project – South Kerry Development Partnership (SKDP), Ireland.

WP6 – Training and Support – Arctic Technology Centre (ARTEK), Greenland.

WP7 – Dissemination – University of Umea, Sweden

WP3 Benchmarking Best Practices3 Calls and selection of 15 Best Practices

Ecological Architecture(Scotland) architectural practise specialising in the use of local timber and other natural materials

http://www.ecological-architecture.co.uk Enviroglass (Scotland) Local community trust

manufacturing paving elements from recycle glass locally sourced.

http://www.enviroglass.co.uk Inzievar Woodlands (Scotland) company

managing local native woodland, and sawmill for timber construction. http://www.scottishwood.co.uk/Inzievarold.html

Martinsons Gluelam (Umea) – timer based construction element manufactured from wooden local timber glued together for strength. http://www.martinsons.se/

Martinsons Xlam (Umea) – timber based construction element manufactured from local timber glued across the grain for extra strength. http://www.martinsons.se

WP3 Benchmarking Best Practices3 Calls and 15 Best Practices

Masonite Beams (Umea) – Timber based construction elements made from timber beams/posts and intermediate resin board cross member for strength.http://www.byggmagroup.se/dt_subfront.aspx?m=2339

SWECO (Umea) – major architectural practice specialising in construction in timber, including larger structure like bridges, office blocks. http://www.swecogroup.com/en/Sweco- group/Solutions/Buildings/

The Hollies Centre for Sustainability (Cork) – training centre giving practical training and demonstration of use of natural materials in building, including straw bales and timber construction (Segal System) http://thehollies.ie/cob

MAKAR Ecological Homes (Inverness) – House design and building service delivering ecological homes from locally sourced sustainable timber . http://makar.co.uk/who-we-are/makar

NEES 2 Mission To build upon the work of the NEES project and identify and promote 15 more products and services that improve energy efficiency, both in operation and over the entire life-cycle of buildings.The products will make use primarily of renewable or recycled materials in manufacture. The services will be based on natural processes and application of renewable and recycled materials, and both will originate or be normally accessible in the NPA Region. They will have the potential for being mainstreamed and commercially disseminated inside and outside the region and will demonstrate 30% energy savings and 80% CO2 reductions through 7 demonstrators projects in different climatic locations. This will be evidenced by life-cycle assessments.In addition, NEES 2 will provide an on-line assessor tool for products and services.

NEES 2 Main Results

NEES2 results will be primarily achieved through demonstration, dissemination and replication. We will identify, demonstrate and promote the viability of renewable, reused and recycled products, together with the services required for installation. This approach, when mainstreamed, will lead to increased life-cycle energy efficiency savings of up to 30% and the reduction of CO2 emissions of up to 80% in the construction industry, as well as reductions in toxicity, improvements in internal air quality, and end-of-life waste disposal problems for buildings.

NEES 2 Main Results (1/2)

The specific results include the following:

Review and updating of the NEES Criteria, which will be comprehensively updated and honed to form the basis of all activities. The identifying of 15 new best practice products and services from new regions The NEES Assessor, an on-line assessment tool that will make the Criteria universally available, allowing producers and service providers to assess the sustainability of their offerings. We expect 200 such submissions during the project lifetime The Assessor will also allow builders, professionals and clients to identify accredited products and services. We expect 1,000 such enquiries during the project lifetime and 500 leading to energy-saving changes.7 social housing or public buildings will be worked on in different NPA areas. Each building will provide a different design solution incorporating renewable and recycled materials, and reducing energy use by 30% and CO2 emissions by 80%. LCA assessments will be carried out to verify these results. These demonstrators will improve energy efficiency for 250 households, including residents and users, and will be visited by an estimated 200 persons each during the project life.

The NEES Toolkit will provide products and approaches that will allow an estimated 500 households to improve energy efficiency in their homes.

The NEES Incubator Service will support 20 SMEs providing sustainable products and services

Practical training provided by NEES2 will allow a further 500 households to improve their energy efficiency.

Professional CDP training will lead to the professionals specifying improvement of a further 250 homes

Capacity building by partners to community groups will lead to the improvement of an additional 500 homes

A dissemination programme will reach 1,000 social enterprises, 250 local authorities, 100 regional public authorities, 250 national public authorities, 250 sectoral agencies, 50 infrastructure providers, 250 construction and media enterprise, 1,000 SME producers and service providers, 300 training centres and schools, 300 higher education establishments, 300 interest groups and NGOs, 100 international organisations and 500 national branches of international organisations, as well as 200,000 members of the persons by the end of the project. The urgency of the problems addressed required maximum impact

NEES 2 Main Results (2/2)

NEES 2 Work Programme Co-ordinators 2016 - 2019

WP1 – Project Management – Cork Centre for Architectural Education (CCAE), Ireland

WP2 – Criteria and Calls for Best Practices - Products and Services – Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), Scotland.

WP3 – Specification and Implementation of the On-Line Assessment Tool – Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Finland.

WP4 – Identification, Implementation, Monitoring and Assessment of Demonstrators– Navirk College, Norway and ARTEK, Greenland

WP5 – Transnational Incubator and NEES2 Service– University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, Ireland.

WP6 – Training and Community Engagement– Clar ICH, Claremorris, Ireland.

WP7 – Communication – Cork Environment Forum, Cork, Ireland

NEES 2 - WP2 – Criteria and Calls for Best Practices - Products and Services

This WP will review the NEES Best Practice criteria, which are built on the results of a study of over 600 sustainability assessment tools conducted by GCU as part of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council SUE-MoT project, and designed to relate to other European and regional initiatives (e.g. Nature Plus, the Scottish Sustainability Label). These will be revised in order to integrate them into an online assessment tool. The output of the tool will be in the form of a spider diagram rating performance against each of the NEES criteria and an overall score. The NEES Criteria will also inform the targeting strategy for identifying additional demonstrators (WP5), and are integral to the communication of the aims of the project to experts and policy-makers (all WPs).This revision and tool development will be conducted in parallel with three new Calls for Best Practices (BPs), which will be administered by GCU as part of this WP, and the resulting online tool will be piloted in parallel with the third call. The intention being to implement the assessment in such a way that future Calls can be conducted with minimal human input, in order to be able to sustain the accreditation of new Best Practices as efficiently as possible beyond the end of the project. The three Calls will adopt the same process successfully established by the closing stages of the first NEES Project, with all full partners contributing two experts to the Expert Panel (to ensure all partners are represented at each meeting), who will evaluate the applications and meet to confirm the results of each Call and agree feedback to applicants.

NEES 2 - WP3 – Specification and Implementation of the On-Line Tool

In WP4 the selected project group will specify and develop Online Assessment Tool to identify and collect information of examples of which the best practice cases will be selected.The software development will be done using iterative, incremental software project management method called Scrum. It utilizes empirical approach, short software development intervals (called sprints) and includes agile programming environments (e.g. ScrumMaster, Scrumwise, CodeIgniter, Grails etc.). After the internal testing phase with project partners, the Tool will be published as a WWW-portal and deployed publicly. With the experiences and feedback from the third call, final streamlining will be implemented on the software. To open it wider audience (general public), new features (search by material, source, product etc.) will be added to the Tool. Marketing name for the software could be e.g. NEES ASSESSOR.The details of best practice and other NEES accredited products and services will be available on the NEES Assessor, to allow builders and home-owners to select materials and services to improve the energy efficiency of their homes.

NEES 2 - WP4 – Identification, Implementation, Monitoring and Assessment of Demonstrators

In this WP we will Identify and implement Demonstration Projects (DPs) from projects proposed by partners from various regions involved in the project. Best practices identified in the project will be implemented in those DPs including examples of energy efficiency retrofit, construction of extensions and solar conservatories, energy-saving and low-energy products, design services aimed at reducing the need for energy, energy audit services aiming at changing behaviour towards better energy management etc.Those DPs will be monitored to perform Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) on the embedded energy and embedded CO2 using qualitative and quantitative procedures. Gathered data will be archived in digital records and uploaded to the online portal to illustrate and highlight various technologies. In addition, this dissemination tool can provide valuable information to a wider professional audience.Other dissemination tools such as workshops and seminars held at DP’s locations will be used to explain the materials and implemented technologies. The DP’s s will be monitored and assessed in terms of TPB indicators, to proof against this criterion, and this information will be made available on the online portal and other dissemination materials. We’ll organize three calls (one each project year) to invite potential cases of retrofit by renewable/sustainable/recyclable materials in each participating country.

NEES 2 - WP5 – Transnational Incubator and NEES2 ServiceThis WP identifies the revolutionary, scalable, high-potential growth innovations identified during the call for best practices and legacy products / services identified during the NPA NEES project, that have mass market potential. Each of the companies offering these products / services will work with WP4 to develop means and strategies to scale up implementation. The Transnational Incubator will contribute to the NEES objectives by:Developing / enhancing business plans with high potential for replicability in partner regions.Enhancing the competiveness of SMEs in the Northern Periphery Region.Using an open and cross regional selection criteria, WP4 will work with SMEs already operating within this sector to enhance their existing business models and help them develop new models to increase their competitiveness and increase their market share.In addition, this WP will ensure the legacy of NEES 2 by monetising the frameworks and methodologies developed during the funding period and enabling them to be utilised beyond the project period. Upon conclusion of the project NEES 2 will have access to a variety of tools and datasets which could form the basis of a one stop shop for housing associations, homeowners, architects, the construction industry and policy makers. This service would also have the added benefit of enabling natural and recyclable energy efficiency technology providers to mainstream their products and services

Thanks!