Association for Environment Conscious Building

The association was founded in 1989 to increase awareness within the construction industry of the need to respect, protect, preserve and enhance the environment and to develop, share and promote best practice in environmentally sustainable building.

It estimates that these low-risk options, will reduce overall CO₂ emissions by 70% compared with the UK average for buildings of each type – a result it feels is highly significant given the relative ease and low cost with which these standards could be met.

The AECB, believing that rigorous alternative approaches based on successful overseas' experience for sustainable design and construction have a complementary place alongside UK government initiatives, has been lobbying for the Government's Code for Sustainable Homes to be aligned with its CLP, or at least for the CLP (despite its methodological and base-line measuring differences) to be treated as an alternative official route for effectively designing and delivering low energy and low carbon buildings.

As the monitoring figures accumulate, the database will offer increasing numbers of well-illustrated and robust benchmarks for the energy and carbon performance levels that can be achieved, across a wide range of building types.

[4] Less is More is a significant new contribution to the debate and offers an alternative to the emerging orthodoxy of large-scale electrification of heat and road transport as a way to achieve or beat the UK's 2050 CO2 emissions target.

This is based on more vigorous and systematic pursuit of energy efficiency throughout the economy; on technologies such as large-scale solar heat, piped to urban buildings; a road and air transport system synthesising liquid fuels in part from renewable electricity, supplementing the biofuel resource; a small electricity supply system, supplied largely by despatchable sources, assisting with network security; and the more vigorous pursuit of carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration options, particularly in the biosphere.

The authors note that water is supplied by vertically-integrated and regulated local monopolies, which have access to capital at near-public sector interest rates, especially if they are debt-funded.

In 2022, it launched its own free magazine "Setting the Standard" which contains original commentary, analysis and thought pieces from the world of sustainable, green building.