Global Issues

Energy efficiency is an issue that transcends international boundaries.  To respond to the global need to reduce building energy consumption, building professionals and policymakers alike must draw on innovative technical and programmatic solutions from home and abroad.

Like states and locals governments in the U.S., countries across the globe are struggling to put in place effective mandatory energy requirements for their buildings to reduce energy use and carbon emissions.  This core issue has no boundaries and connects all governments.

To address unsustainable production and consumption patterns in buildings, sharing and coordination among stakeholders (both in the U.S. and abroad) is crucial to producing comprehensive and practical solutions. While climate, culture, tradition, economics, and available materials vary from one country or locale to another, the international building sector must take advantage of untapped opportunities to learn from how others are tacking the same problems in other countries.

Worldwide, many hurdles exist to the adoption of improved building energy codes:

1. In most states and countries, several regulatory bodies contribute to the adoption, enforcement, and compliance processes – making effective building energy code improvements difficult. 
2. Lack of interest in energy code issues by governments can stifle reforms. Without an active government to level the playing field and provide incentives and support to the building sector, it is very difficult to build a framework for improving building energy efficiency.
3.  Codes need to be communicated to the right stakeholders and enforced to be effective. At present, communication and enforcement efforts often fall short.
4.  A lack of educational resources for decision makers, the construction industry, and enforcement communities challenges governments to achieve successful code implementation.

While there are many strategies to tackle these issues, technical and programmatic solutions to energy code implementation can be shared successfully between countries. Yet at present, most well-meaning governments are on their own to develop new ideas from scratch. To avoid unnecessary work, it is critical that governments have access to successful strategies, lessons learned, and best practices that can make the code adoption and enforcement process more manageable. As well, for members of the building sector, having access to code improvements and actual implementation experiences of others can help these stakeholders identify trends, better understand opportunities and barriers, and determine what preventative measures should be implemented to avoid potential problems.