iiSBE is an international non-profit organization whose overall aim is to actively facilitate and promote the adoption of policies, methods and tools to accelerate the movement towards a global sustainable built environment. iiSBE has an international Board of Directors from almost every continent and has a small Secretariat located in Ottawa, Canada. Our specific objectives include the following:
- Map current activities and establish a forum for information exchange on SBE initiatives, so that gaps and overlaps may be reduced and common standards established; and
- Increase awareness of existing SBE initiatives and issues amongst the international buildings and construction community;
- Take action on fields not covered by existing organisations and networks.
We have active Chapter organizations in Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, Israel, Portugal, Taiwan and Korea, and iiSBE Canada is in the process of formation.
Our most important activity is networking; helping specialists and generalists to get to know each others’ abilities and needs. This occurs formally through our databases and newsletter, and informally through every-day e-mails.
We are well known for the continuing development of our building performance assessment system, formerly known as GBTool, and now called SBTool. This is a flexible framework operating on Excel that can be configured to suit almost any local condition or building type.
In 2007, we developed a version of SBTool to suit the needs of an international competition sponsored by the Principality of Monaco, to extend the downtown area into the sea. The flexible framework proved its worth and its application was an unqualified success. The current version is SBTool 2016. We have active technical working groups, focusing on SBTool, Urban Indicators and Synergy Zones;
IiSBE, CIB, UNEP, FIDIC and the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (Global ABC) are international co-sponsors of the SBE global conference series that began at Maastricht in 2000, then went on to Oslo in 2002, Tokyo in 2005, Melbourne in 2008, Helsinki in 2011 and Barcelona in 2014. The next global event will be held in Hong Kong in June 2017. The SBE partners also manage a series of national SBE conferences in the years prior to the global events. In 2016, 20 conferences are taking place. iiSBE is one of five international partners that own and manage the SBE series, but we are recognized as the main actor in guiding the series;
We are managing and providing technical support for the Sustainable Building Challenge (SBC) process, which invites design and development teams to display projects with measurable performance data at our global SBE conferences. The projects need to be assessed by any of the established rating systems and also need to submit data on key performance indicators;
We are a partner organization of the UNEP Sustainable Building and Construction Initiative (SBCI), a group of global construction-sector firms that develop initiatives related to sustainable building;
Most recently, we have joined the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (Global ABC), a global umbrella group on climate change action that emerged from COP21, and we are actively providing Global ABC with organizational and communications assistance.
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