Intended Outcome of the Programme

Buildings that better meet user needs by sustainably utilising natural resources while minimising adverse impacts on the environment.

This programme will develop knowledge and tools to improve the performance and sustainability of today's and tomorrow's buildings, starting from a better understanding of the performance of current buildings and user requirements. The programme will provide information, data and tools to feed into national strategies and policies for climate change, energy efficiency, and waste. The programme includes HEEP (Household Energy End-use Project) a sociophysical model of household energy use. HEEP will support planning for an environmentally sustainable future, in the context of providing for healthy and comfortable living spaces for coming generations. The model will help to quantify the impacts of changing demographics and the increasing ecoawareness of New Zealanders, with consequent changes in consumer behaviour. The research will assist in improving the energy and thermal performance of present and future houses. The programme will also develop environmental data and tools to better understand and evaluate the interaction between buildings and the environment (such as air, water, land, mineral resources and energy), including consideration of the following:

• building materials
• building components
• whole buildings
• climate change.

The information and assessment tools will empower designers, material suppliers, builders and building users to understand the interaction between buildings and the environment, and enable them to reduce undesirable effects. This objective is explicitly multi-disciplinary, and will involve specialists in materials science, building physics, structures, design, construction, waste minimisation, climatology, economics and social science, as well as building users.

Today's buildings trace their design ancestry from before the availability of many of today's fuels (e.g. electricity and natural gas) and technologies (e.g. electronic controls and thermal insulation). Although user needs have altered, the buildings have not changed enough to optimally benefit from the fuel and technology shifts. Key end-users of the research results from this programme will include building designers, material suppliers, component manufacturers, builders and building users. The outputs will be of value to policy development of building controls, such as New Zealand Standards and the New Zealand Building Code (NZBC).

The programme comprises two objectives

(Click on the links below for more info about these objectives.)