STBA / SPAB 2020 Conference
The STBA SPAB 2020 Online Conference
The 2020 STBA / SPAB Conference was a great success with around 80-90 participants each day. There were no real internet hitches on the way and we are pleased to announce that pdf’s of the presentations are now available. Links for the presentations are available on the Day pages
Many thanks to the speakers for their time, making their presentations available and for answering the wave of informed questions that flowed during the Q and A session.
STBA and SPAB will be making video available from the conference for you to enjoy. Of course all delegates received their copies of the pdfs and videos of the conference just days afterwards, but we feel that it is good to share this information as widely as possible.
The core of Government policy and indeed the concern of the public is to radically reduce our world’s dependency of carbon and to reduce our emissions to a level that is sustainable for the planet. This is an absolute key goal that is fully supported by both the STBA and SPAB. The issue comes with how to we actually achieve this in a sustainable manner that does not adversely impact on the many social and historical factors that are embedded into our existing built environment. This long argument has been largely won thanks to the impassioned work of the STBA, SPAB and many others. The advent of PAS2035 means that there are some safeguards coming into place.
The remaining problem is that lots of works to buildings means a lot of carbon being expended in the short term to save ‘in-use’ carbon. The term ’embodied carbon’ needs to be part of this equation and this opens up the debate. What carbon is already stored within our built environment? What type of materials could be used in retrofit, that are compatible with traditional buildings, and how does their embodied carbon effect choice? Can we even measure the effects of these choices and are there tools that can help?
Knowledge and skills go hand and hand. It is imperative therefore that we ensure that we have a workforce that is capable and competent to undertake the changes that the built environment needs to shoulder. In this section of the conference we aim to share the context of an emerging new skills requirement, explore background training data, view one working solution and facilitate a constructive debate.
This is an amazing dynamic area of the industry and one that requires fresh thinking and action. With today’s speakers we will get this in spades. New ways of working being devised and demanded by Welsh Government, latest research from CITB and some community led solutions from the South West.
Underpinning all of the above is research. It is therefore imperative that we are all up to speed with what’s going on from some of our top researchers in the field. These can be both academically funded or undertaken from the keenest of practitioners. In today’s session we have a mix of both. Leeds Beckett University have compiled a huge sample of retrofitted projects and assessed them. Here we will learn some salient lessons and garner some direction forward. Archimetrics have concluded there long term research programme with SPAB and we shall be treated to a final update and set of conclusions and lastly we have an in-depth practical study looking at carbon within a listed building.
Conference was SPAB CPD accredited.
