Workshop cum training on "Clean-Build: Pathways to Decarbonize the Built Environment"

CSE conducted a workshop and onsite training on “Clean-Build: Pathways to Decarbonize the Built Environment”. Theprogramme was conducted at India Habitat Centreon April23, 2024, and was attended by participants comprising of researchers, municipality officers, thinktanks and academia.

The workshopkicked off at India Habitat Centre with Mr. Rajneesh Sareen emphasizing the role of environmental impact assessment as an environmental safeguard towards decarbonizing the built environment. He explained how sensitivity, adaptive capacity and exposure are three key components for understanding vulnerability of a sector. Ms. Mitashi Singh in her consecutive lecture presented CSE’s study on city heat analysis of 10 cities. Cities in India are becoming heat centres with several cities having more than 80 per cent of their areas under risk. Dr. Nimish Gupta elaborated the findings further in his session on ‘Sweltering cities: extreme heat and strategies for its management in cities’. Post the sessions at AAETI, participants were taken to a site visit of a Construction and Demolition waste recycling plant in Noida. After the visit the participants proceeded to the Anil Agarwal Environment Training Institute.

Day 2 began with Dr. Nimish introducing the participants to the Potential of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) in studying urban climates, offering both an introduction and hands-on session for identifying urban heat centres and explaining the method for capturing various heat drivers. This was followed by Mr. Sugeet Grovers session in which he explained the fundamentals of designing buildings through passive design and emphasized how these principles form the backbone for achieving thermal comfort and reducing operational energy in buildings. Mr. Rajneesh further continued this journey by introducing Energy Efficiency Building Codes, their compliance procedures and requirements. The next session was taken up by Mr. Madhusudan Rao from Oorja. Mr. Rao delved into how renewable energy and sustainable cooling/heating solutions both are necessary pathways that need to be taken to achieve net zero buildings. He supported this with examples from case studies from across the country with stress on structural cooling as a potential cooling solution fit for the Indian climate. The day amended with participants being taken for a tour of the campus for an exercise regarding the campus’s green features.

On day 3, Mr. Rajneesh Sareen began with a session on the confluence of renewable energy within the urban setting. This was followed by Mr. Kaifee Jawed’s session on Bio-CNG: a green alternative to fossil fuels. The next session was taken by Dr. Kalyana Rama, Associate Professor at Mahindra University. Mr. Rama introduced the audience with a methodology to calculate embodied carbon for various life cycle stages of a building with different raw materials. He supported this with various examples and tools for calculations. Following this Mr. Sugeet took the audience for a journey in which he described how government led initiatives have introduced emerging construction materials and technologies to the country. The lecture emphasized on the criteria and parameters that are part of the initiatives to promote materials and what should be added to this list of criteria to ensure more sustainable materials find their way into the market.

The theme of sustainable materials continued with a session by Mr. Rajneesh Sareen who spoke about circularity and resource efficiency to make people aware of the challenges that the world faces due to a linear approach to consumption and the waste it creates. He introduced the audience to the 2016 rules governing C&D waste management, the challenges in its implementation and the ecosystem approach that is required to solve it. Mr. Sugeet Grover continued this further by introducing the various technologies involved in a C&D recycling plant along with the products that come out of the process.

On the last day, the participants were involved in an exercise to identify the resources in the region that could be used for construction, this involved use of construction demolition waste, as well as low embodied renewable materials. Post the exercise, Mr. Sugeet Grover introduced participants to how climate change is driving a shift towards increased utilization of non-recyclable materials with higher embodied energy, presenting a significant challenge. He also highlighted how hybrid technologies (combining traditional and modern approaches) could help alleviate these issues. This was supported by case studies that CSE conducted in West Bengal and Odisha on the subject. At the end of the day, the participants presented their findings pertaining to the exercises conducted on day 2 and day 4.