Description:

The Trienens Institute will host a seminar series to review global challenges in sustainable development and the creation of a sustainable global economy and ecosystem. Each seminar will focus on a sector of the economy and will begin with a short presentation to review key challenges and pose questions for consideration.

The second seminar in the series will address the urban environment and buildings. We will review global trends in urbanization and factors that influence sustainable city planning and development. We will look at energy use and direct emissions from buildings around the world to understand the challenges in achieving net zero emissions for residential and commercial buildings. We will briefly survey technologies that play a role in electrification of the building sector and reduction of building embodied emissions. The discussion will focus on technical innovations in energy and materials to address sustainability of cities and the built environment.