Get Sust! Issue 44

Working towards sustainable cities in India

The newly industrialised nations of India and China are often cited as an excuse against energy efficiency in the ‘developed nations’ such as Britain and the US. So it’s one in the eye for the climate change deniers to hear that designers and researchers are working together to help nations such as India get to grips with their galloping energy requirements.

Get Sust supporter Dr Rajat Gupta (reader at the Department of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University), reports that the UK-India conference on ‘Urban sustainability and Green Buildings for the 21st century’ held in Delhi on 15 May 2009, attracted about 225 delegates.

The conference brought together leading international researchers, professionals, policy-makers and other stakeholders and featured presentations from: the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy and Bureau of Energy Efficiency, Government of India; Oxford Brookes University; Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Rorkee; IIT Delhi; The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI); School of Planning and Architecture (SPA); and CASLE.

The conference highlighted the need for developing and applying city-wide carbon counting and urban sustainability tools, and for aligning Indian environment rating systems such as GRIHA and LEED-India with international rating systems.

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The conference presentations will be available from 15 June 2009 at: www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/be/oisd/conferences/ukindia09.html