- Case studies
- Projects seeking partners
- Lessons learnt
- Best practice today
- Life-cycle costing made simple
- Sustainable refurbishment
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
Improving the sustainability of building, construction and renovation will make an important contribution to achieving Defra's strategic priorities, including climate change and energy, sustainable consumption and production and natural resource protection.
About half of our current CO2 emissions come from buildings. Building to better standards offers the opportunity for long-term resource efficiency and leads to significant energy and carbon savings through reduced energy consumption.
The joint UK-Sweden Initiative for Sustainable Construction can also promote the development and dissemination of environmental technologies, or technologies that are less environmentally harmful than current alternatives. This is a priority area for the Government, because it has the potential to break the link between economic growth and environmental degradation.
In 2003, an independent Sustainable Buildings Task Group was appointed by the Deputy Prime Minister and the Secretaries of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for Trade and Industry. Jointly chaired by Sir John Harman, Chairman of the Environment Agency, and Victor Benjamin, Deputy Chairman of English Partnerships, the Group was tasked with identifying how Government and industry could improve the quality and sustainability of new and refurbished buildings.
In its report Better Buildings: Better Lives of May 2004, the Group called for the Government and the building industry to adopt a single national Code for Sustainable Buildings, which would raise the quality standards and reduce the unsustainable use of natural resources in the built environment. Defra is working with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and industry on this code. This will establish stretching voluntary standards for resource efficiency on key issues such as energy, water, waste and materials, encouraging builders to go beyond the letter of the regulations and minimise resource use from the start. It will be updated as technology develops.