Shaping Tomorrow: Systems Thinking in the Built Environment

Releasing over 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and consuming over 40% of primary resources, the built environment needs an urgent transformation towards climate neutrality and circularity while hosting a booming humanity in dignified conditions under climate change. Optimising individual solutions will not be sufficient to overcome these challenges. Instead, we must adopt systems thinking, which allows us to explore synergies and balance trade-offs between different building functions (safety, comfort, health, among others), scales (materials, components, buildings, cities, planet), sectors (industry, agriculture, energy, among others) and domains (economy, society, ecology).

The conference will address the following main themes:
-Integrated energy and resource use from buildings to territories
-Digital transformation for a systemic shift from a linear to a circular economy
-Economic models for a fast and efficient implementation of regenerative solutions
-Synergies of sustainable systems between environment, society, and economy