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Make Buildings Better – Ideas competition

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Designing Buildings Wiki and BSRIA have launched a ‘Make Buildings Better’ competition, looking for fresh, innovative ideas to improve the performance of buildings in use.

It’s very quick to enter, they want short answers, not long essays. The winner will receive £500 worth of BSRIA membership, training or publications, and along with 4 runners-up, will be featured in the July edition of BSRIA’s Delta T magazine and on Designing Buildings Wiki.

Why does it matter?

The UK is not on track to halve greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2025 or to achieve an 80% reduction by 2050. This affects our contribution to the COP21 goal agreed in Paris last year for keeping global warming well below 2 degrees centigrade.

According to BIS, 47% of UK carbon emissions are generated by, or influenced by the construction industry, and 80% of those emissions are from buildings in use. So if the performance of buildings does not improve, we are unlikely to achieve our emissions targets.

But buildings in use continue to consume far more energy than is predicted during design. The latest figures from Innovate UK’s Building Performance Evaluation Programme found the average total carbon emissions of the homes they assessed was 2.6 times higher than the design estimates, and for non-domestic buildings was 3.8 times higher.

Radical change is needed.

How to enter

Dust off all those wild ideas you dreamt up in the middle of the night, write down the answers to the world’s problems that only usually occur to you in the pub, and tell them what can be done to reduce the emissions of buildings in use.

To enter, go to the ‘Make Buildings Better’ page on Designing Buildings Wiki

The competition closes on Wednesday 18 May.