Posts in the 'Building Efficiency' category
Million Cool Roofs Challenge Covers the Global ‘Cooling Crunch’ From Another Angle
Million Cool Roofs Challenge Covers the Global ‘Cooling Crunch’ From Another Angle
Cities in the global south today face a complex challenge: like all cities, they need to reduce carbon emissions, but they also need to expand access to energy. Around the world, 1.1 billion people currently lack access to electric cooling ...
Better Buildings Mean a Brighter Future: 3 Technologies to Decrease Energy Use
Better Buildings Mean a Brighter Future: 3 Technologies to Decrease Energy Use
Building efficiency is one of the most effective and affordable solutions for addressing climate change and capping carbon emissions. Yet it is so often drowned by discussions of electric vehicles and solar panels. Given that better buildings are a great ...
Advancing Innovations for More Efficient Buildings in Indian Cities
Advancing Innovations for More Efficient Buildings in Indian Cities
TheCityFix Labs India, launched in Hyderabad on October 8 in partnership with the Financing Sustainable Cities Initiative and Citi Foundation, is focused on finding innovative ways to connect India’s rapidly growing urban areas with basic services, like water, waste management and ...
Can Housing Be Affordable Without Being Efficient?
Can Housing Be Affordable Without Being Efficient?
About 3 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, will need new housing by 2030. That will require constructing approximately 21 million new homes every year across the world. Several of the fastest-growing countries have ambitious goals to ...
Amid Climate Uncertainty, Zero-Carbon Buildings Offer a Guiding North Star
Amid Climate Uncertainty, Zero-Carbon Buildings Offer a Guiding North Star
“Back in the good old days, the construction industry had to worry about a few keys things: Will it stand up, is it functional and does it look nice? Not so anymore.” So began WRI President and CEO Andrew Steer ...
How Behavioral Science Can Boost Household Energy Efficiency
How Behavioral Science Can Boost Household Energy Efficiency
Persuading people to use energy more efficiently has long been heralded as a simple, effective way to help tackle climate change. The problem lies in the persuasion. Historically, policies and programs to encourage people to save energy have relied largely ...
4 Ways Businesses Can Get the Most Out of Public-Private Collaboration: Lessons from the Building Efficiency Accelerator
4 Ways Businesses Can Get the Most Out of Public-Private Collaboration: Lessons from the Building Efficiency Accelerator
How can businesses provide more value to, and receive more value from, collaborative initiatives with cities? Businesses are the ones that design, build, finance, own, operate, renovate and occupy most of the buildings in cities. Without active collaboration and support ...
Boosting the Cool Factor of Energy Efficiency
Boosting the Cool Factor of Energy Efficiency
Energy efficiency’s image is due for a makeover. Long seen as one of the simplest ways to reduce consumer costs, energy efficiency also offers multiple benefits that improve people’s lives while cutting air pollution and curbing climate-warming emissions. And yet, ...
A First Step Down the Road to Zero-Carbon Buildings in India
A First Step Down the Road to Zero-Carbon Buildings in India
In 2013, the world’s cities accounted for 64 percent of primary energy use and 70 percent of CO2 emissions. Energy use in buildings is the second largest contributor (after transport) to urban GHG emissions and to urban heat islands. Emissions ...
Greening at Altitude: Bogotá Makes National Building Codes a Local Reality with the Help of Some Friends
Greening at Altitude: Bogotá Makes National Building Codes a Local Reality with the Help of Some Friends
As countries around the world ramp up ambition toward global climate and development goals, Bogotá’s experience is an example of why they should look to cities for “ground-truthing.” At 8,600 feet above sea level, high on an Andean plateau, Bogotá is Colombia’s largest city and one ...
How the FSCI Is Improving Urban Energy Efficiency by Encouraging Building Retrofits, Providing Alternative Business Models
How the FSCI Is Improving Urban Energy Efficiency by Encouraging Building Retrofits, Providing Alternative Business Models
The majority of the energy used by buildings is wasted, resulting in increased energy costs and air pollution. Among C40 cities, this translates to between 50 percent and 75 percent of citywide carbon emissions. Therefore, due to the sheer amount of energy consumed by buildings, ...
India’s Move to Make Buildings Efficient
India’s Move to Make Buildings Efficient
India’s buildings are silent power guzzlers. Residential and commercial structures consumed nearly a third (32 percent) of the country’s total electricity in 2016, according to the latest annual energy statistics published by the Ministry of Statistics, Planning and Implementation. And as Indian ...
Voices of Efficiency: Dubai's Quest to Improve Energy Performance Starts with Benchmarking
Voices of Efficiency: Dubai's Quest to Improve Energy Performance Starts with Benchmarking
Dubai is blazing a new path for cities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by calling attention to energy consumption in buildings and highlighting the lack of data available to benchmark usage rates and measure progress. In 2016, Dubai joined ...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/pamhule/15150083581/
How Can China’s Green Building Sector Grow Fivefold by 2030? 3 Cities Show Us the Way
China has grand plans to green its buildings. The country’s national climate commitment calls for 50 percent of all new buildings constructed by 2020 to be certified green buildings, while its 13th Five-Year Plan prioritizes building efficiency. Following through on ...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/turkian/32952204324/
Voices of Efficiency: Dinh Quang Cuong, Amit Prothi and Da Nang’s Plans for a Resilient, Efficient Economy
The government of Da Nang, Vietnam has prioritized building efficiency as part of its new Resilience Strategy to address public health and economic risks from climate change. In 2016, the city began working with the global Building Efficiency Accelerator (BEA) ...
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