Is your house design as eco-friendly as you think?

The Irish Green Building Council has launched a campaign to tackle the whole life environmental impact of buildings, in a bid to think beyond the energy we use to heat and light our homes.

Building an eco-friendly home can mean different things to different people; in most cases though it has to do with making sure the house requires very little energy to run, or even produces more energy than it needs.

However these “operational emissions” are only part of the picture. There are other environmental impacts to consider, including the manufacturing, transportation, construction, and end-of-life phases of built assets – often called embodied emissions – which account for around 11 per cent of all global greenhouse gases.

And so, on the five-year anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC) launched a campaign to decarbonise Ireland’s built environment across its whole life cycle.

As part of #BuildingLife, the trade body plans to bring together representatives from across the sector to produce a science-based and industry-backed national decarbonisation roadmap for the built environment.