Communities and built environment

Our cities and communities face challenges caused by rapid urbanisation, increasing populations, climate change and resource scarcity. 

These lead to significant infrastructure strains and the need to improve an unfit and aging built environment. Immediate action is needed to reduce carbon emissions to help mitigate global warming, to secure resource availability, increase reliability, affordability, and efficiency, to improve resilience to environmental threats and to ensure optimum and sustainable social-economic development.  

This can only be achieved through significant innovation, suitable policies and planning, and these can be unlocked through collaborative multidisciplinary research, pioneering technologies, business innovation and wide scale participation from a range of stakeholders. 

Communities are at the heart of this challenge and offer part of the solution. Our community energy initiatives will change the way we use energy, spreading awareness and influencing policy decisions as we move towards a sustainable future.

Each of our challenges has several co-leads from the Faculties of Social Science, Science and Engineering. If you would like to find out more about this challenge contact Lucelia Rodrigues in the first instance.