12 September 2016, 13:29

On 12-13 April, 2016, “SusBuild: Up-scaling and mainstreaming sustainable building practices in western China” was kicked off in Chongqing, China.

The two-day conference aimed to officially start the SusBuild project and to initiate EU-China dialogues on various aspects of sustainable buildings.  It brought together 280 participants, which included decision-makers from national and local governments, Chinese enterprises and provincial associations from all provinces in western China, and German organisations. 

Key governmental stakeholders at both national and local level were invited to the opening ceremony on 12 April. Those included:

• Mr. Chen Yimin, the chief engineer (vice Minister) of  the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) of PR China;
• Mr. Ni Jiangbo, the deputy director of  Department for Buildings Energy, Science and Technology of MOHURD;
• Mr. Wu Po, deputy director of Chongqing Municipal Committee of Housing and Urban & Rural Development;
• Ms. Pan Yiqin, the general secretary of CPC of District Qijiang in Chongqing. 

Mr. Wu Yong, the director of China Association of Building Energy Efficiency, joined the opening ceremony.

First, Dr. Chun Xia-Bauer, SusBuild project coordinator, presented the motivation to develop this action, the specific objectives of this action, the project partners, and the project approach.

Mr. Chen Yimin acknowledged the importance of the SusBuild project for sustainable building development in western China and beyond, due to its following features:

• The project content matches the current needs of the building sector in China ;
• The project case study regions, i.e. Chongqing and Yunnan, are well selected;
• The timing of the project is very good, which is fully in line with MoHURD’s priority of scaling up sustainable building practices in the whole country.

He concluded that MoHURD will provide all the necessary support to the SusBuild project implementation and will take the experiences and outputs to be achieved by the SusBuild project into MoHURD’s policies and strategies of sustainable building development.

His speech was followed by Ms. Pan Yiqin. She welcomed that SusBuild project selected a project in District Qijiang as the one pilot of sustainable building materials production. In fact, the district aims to be the sustainable building materials production centre in western China.

Finally, Mr. Wu Po stated that Chongqing Municipal Committee of Housing and Urban & Rural Development will actively participate in and strongly support the SusBuild project implementation as an associate partner. He hopes that SusBuild project will provide recommendations to local building development.

The opening ceremony was followed by various presentations delivered by key stakeholders from national and local levels in China and from Europe. It started with the presentation of progress, challenges, and perspectives of sustainable buildings in China and Europe by officials and experts from national and local levels as well as European experts. This was followed by three thematic sessions: sustainable building materials and components, sustainable building design and construction, and energy management in buildings. In these sessions, experts from both Chinese and European organisations shared valuable insights.

The presentations from the SusBuild kick-off conference are listed below and can be downloaded from our Library. 

On 13 April, about 80 conference participants visited a project pilot buildings and an industry park aiming at developing modern building industry clusters in District Qijiang. 

The two-day gathering was short, but it kicked off dialogues on sustainable buildings among various actors in the building sector from China and Europe.