Principal Debby Ray on being an editor for London Energy Transformation Initiative’s Climate Emergency Design Guide

In the free, downloadable document, readers will find approaches, targets and benchmarks developments to use as reference points when building sustainable built environments. Focusing on five main aspects—operational energy, embodied carbon, the future of heat, demand response and data disclosure—the group’s methodology sets requirements for archetypes that include small scale residential, medium to large scale residential, commercial offices and schools.

The volunteer-based group believes that these steps are necessary to combat the global climate crisis. Providing benchmarks for the next decade, the group believes it should take the industry five years to refine their approaches and institute standards into design practices. By 2020, it says that 10 percent of “all new projects that developers and designers are involved in should be designed to meet the requirements set out in this guide.” Project teams that achieve the LETI requirements can register their projects as exemplars.

To download the Climate Emergency Design Guide, follow this link.

The LETI guide is complemented by the Embodied Carbon Primer, which provides developers, designers, policymakers and the supply chain with an approach to reduce carbon dioxide emitted during the manufacture, transport and construction of building materials.