OREANDA-NEWS. June 18, 2014. ArcelorMittal has joined other members of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBSCD) and partners including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for a three-day panel on energy efficiency in buildings.

The workshop is being hosted in Warsaw, Poland, and aims to bring together the key stakeholders of a building’s value chain to define a business case for investing in energy-efficient building methods and materials from the architecture phase to the building’s end user. The workshop is a part of the WBCSD’s Energy Efficiency in Buildings (EEB) market transformation initiative EEB 2.0.

In these three days, a committee of experts made up of representatives from the WBCSD and its partners will consult with key building market stakeholders including developers, investors, designers, engineering firms, facility operators, users and even corporate tenants. An expert from the ArcelorMittal global research and development team is representing our company as a member of the technical committee which is in charge of gathering feedback from attendees on where innovation is needed. As a material and systems component producer, this direct engagement gives ArcelorMittal the opportunity to better understand its stakeholders’ expectations around energy efficiency in buildings.

Buildings account for just over a third of global final energy use, consuming more energy than the transport or industry sectors. They are responsible for a quarter of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. “We must reduce energy consumption in buildings if we are serious about addressing the climate change challenge,” explained Roland Hunziker, WBCSD’s project director for the EEB 2.0.

As the name suggests, the EEB 2.0 is the second phase of the project – recently launched but due to continue until 2015. EEB 2.0 aims at transforming the market for energy efficiency in buildings by leading a replicable process of innovation and collaboration that accelerates investments in projects that produce radical improvements in energy efficiency in buildings.

Following this week’s sessions in Warsaw, a committee of experts will analyse the outcomes of the discussions, diagnose the key barriers to energy efficiency and make recommendations on how to overcome these barriers. The results will be shared during a high level plenary session on June 12 in partnership with The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders’ Group.