Quakers call for ‘mass build’ of eco buildings
Friends support a call for councils to commit to more ecological building schemes
Friends in Yorkshire have supported a call made by a Quaker sustainability expert for councils to commit to more ecological building schemes.
Chris Herring, member of Huddersfield Meeting and chair of both the Passivhaus Trust and the International Passive House Association Affiliates Council, called on the local council ‘to follow the example of cities like Heidelberg and Vancouver in adopting Passivhaus on a large scale’. Passivhaus – or ‘passive house’ – is a method and standard of low-energy building, which, according to Chris Herring, can help create buildings which use around seventy-five per cent less energy than standard new UK buildings.
Huddersfield Quakers backed the call, tweeting: ‘Hoping that Kirklees Council and councils around the UK take up this vital challenge to mass build Passivhaus.’ The Meeting recently campaigned for the climate emergency announced by Kirklees Council.
In a report about the Passivhaus annual conference in May on the website for the Green Building Store, of which Chris Herring is director, he praised the leadership of the conference’s host city Heidleberg in Germany for its Bahnstadt project, and of the nearby city Walldorf for its Passivhaus buildings: ‘Cities must be pioneers in climate protection and to show leadership, as we have also seen in the UK, for example, in Exeter and Norwich.’
Chris Herring said the challenges had been brought into sharper relief partly due to the impact of Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, as well as last year’s report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. He said: ‘It is only change at large scale that can now address the depth of crisis we face.’
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