Prof. Guillaume Habert will present a special guest seminar at the University of Melbourne on Monday July 1, 2017 at Engineering-106 (Brown Theatre). The Chair of Sustainable Construction at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) is in Melbourne for the LafargeHolcim Awards jury meeting for Asia Pacific, held at the Melbourne School of Design (MSD) over the weekend.

Buildings and infrastructures create the framework of our daily life. Both production of building materials and construction create hundreds of millions of jobs all over the world. From a life cycle perspective only three areas of consumption; food, private transportation and housing – together are responsible for 70-80% of our environmental impacts and both housing and mobility are interdependent key elements of the built environment.

With the Paris agreement, world leaders agreed to recognise that we have now a limited amount of time to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions. In this feature, buildings play a pivotal role. They are both the main contributors to climate change and the place where the main opportunities for change reside. They are both the problem and the solution.

In this presentation, we show how natural and anthropogenic material cycles can be transformed through the appropriate use of building materials. In particular, we will evaluate how the built environment can be a cost-effective solution for decarbonisation. This requires implementation of alternative building materials as well as the development of new modelling frameworks in order to grasp these opportunities.

Guillaume Habert is Professor of Sustainable Construction at the Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). He is also a member of the Academic Committee (AC) of the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, and was a member of theLafargeHolcim Awards jury for Asia Pacific in 2017.

Date and time: Monday 3rd July 2017, 10:30 to 11:30am

Venue: The University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus, Engineering-106 (Brown Theatre)