Rapid advancement and change within Australia's predominant timber certification schemes has led to the revision of the original November 2004 paper Timber and wood products from environmentally certified forests and plantations. That paper now ...

The Armstrong-Mobbs sustainable house is a celebrated case study of sustainable refurbishment of an inner-city terrace house. The owners, Michael Mobbs and Heather Armstrong, went to unprecedented lengths to integrate energy and water saving systems ...

Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world with many architectural and engineering benefits, but also with a high capacity to improve its environmental performance. The environmental measures that can be taken also improve the ...

Biodiversity, the variety of life on earth, is required for the health of the natural environment and the continuation of the human species.  Though Australia has large endowments of biodiversity, human activities over the past 220 years have had ...

This note was reviewed in October 2018 and has been retained for legacy. In 2003 a demonstration home was constructed by a local authority in Perth to raise public awareness of practical ways to reduce the energy needs for heating and cooling. The ...

Read time: 25 minutes A summary update has been provided for this note in June 2023. This summary reflects updates to this topic on the National Construction Code 2022 and BASIX. There is an urgent need to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to net ...

This note discusses the difficulties currently being experienced in implementing Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) from a development perspective. It looks at what motivates developers and examines what is needed, either through mandatory ...

This note was reviewed and approved for currency in October 2018. The Passivhaus, or Passive House, standard is a rigorous, voluntary and performance-based standard, with fundamental objectives of thermal comfort and energy efficiency. Originally ...

Read time: 11 minutes Welcome to the Jungle House (WTTJH) is a home designed to fit within the existing building’s reconstructed masonry fabric and is an archetypal model of future sustainable carbon neutral living. It is located on a 98sqm ...

Put simply, solar access is the availability of sunlight to a property. For architects, the need to consider solar access in the overall design of a structure is two-fold: Firstly, the structure must be designed and situated on the property to ...