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I. Kovacic:
"Current issues in the implementation of assessment methods and strategies for sustainable planning and building";
Talk: 8th international Conference (5th SENET Conference): Organization, technology and management in construction, Umag, Kroatien; 2008-09-17 - 2008-09-20; in: "Organization, technology and management in construction: proceedings/8th international Conference (5th SENET Conference)", M. Radujkovic (ed.); Croatian Association for Organization in Construction, Zagreb (2008), ISBN: 953-96245-9-2; 8 pages.

The sustainability policy guarantee belongs to the most important tasks of architecture and construction of the new millennium.
40% of the total energy consumption within the EU is used for heating and cooling of buildings. Only within Austria, one fifth of the total CO2-emissions are caused by buildings.
The recent sharpened EC - requirements in terms of climate protection and CO2 minimization underline the urgent necessity for development and application of strategies and innovative technologies for sustainable planning and building.

The Austrian market is world-wide leading in research and practice of low-energy and passive house technology in the area of single family houses and residential developments, which serve as paradigm of sustainable building.
However, this trend cannot be observed uncritically.
Firstly, the governmental encouragement of the construction of single family houses increases the sprawl development, consequentially resulting in the uprising of personal traffic and increase of CO2 emissions. The consideration of these factors in the life-cycle oriented evaluation leads to conclusion that such construction cannot stand for sustainability.
The focus of the prevalent building performance assessments often lies upon consumption of heating energy, the primary energy consumption for construction and demolition as well as the cooling-, lightning- and operation energy demand is hardly considered. The sustainability building performance evaluation is also often mistaken with exclusively environmental evaluation, which considers only one aspect of the sustainability triangle, and does not correspond to the holistic evaluation approach.
The development of new strategies and assessment methods for sustainable building is urgently necessary; however the implementation is hindered through several crucial problems.
This paper will present the current problems the sustainable planning and building process is facing, and researches the coherences of different parameters determining the sustainability performance of a building.

Sustainable building, low energy house, passive house, energy efficiency