Green Building Council Italia

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Green Building Council Italia is a national independent non-profit organization made up of businesses, organizations and building professionals working in the building and construction industry. 

GBC is the largest sustainability network worldwide. There are 75 national Green Building Councils worldwide with over 49000 member organizations. GBC Italia works to advance green buildings at national level, as well as unite with other Green Building Councils to achieve environmental, economic and social goals on a larger, global scale. 

GBC Italia is actively involved in the Europe Regional Network (ERN) of the World GBC, particularly in policy and advocacy activities, and initiatives for market transformation. The ERN (pictured) counts for 25 national GBCs with 4058 member companies and 8 Regional partner companies supporting the activities of the network, with an excellent coverage across Europe.

 The mission of GBC Italia is to “Operate for the construction market’s transformation by promoting design, construction and operation of buildings which are sustainable as it concerns to environment, society, economy, and health.” To do this, GBC Italia’s activities range from initiatives to raise awareness on sustainability, transformation of the market, to fostering synergies between market actors, providing concrete tools and training, organization of events, seminars and workshops all over the Italian territory.

GBC Italia’s members cover the construction stakeholders system, spanning from public administrations to manufacturers, from design firms to other services, from the finance sector to the NGOs, from developers to the Universities etc. Product manufacturers, Industry and Professional Service Firms represent the largest part of GBC Italia’s membership. 

GBC Italia hosts a large number of events and seminars, mostly involving public administrations and authorities, and also coordinates stakeholders within multi-stakeholder policy making processes (as  BUILD UPON, H2020 project). In 2015, GBC Italia, together with USGBC, hosting and organizational partners, held the first Greenbuild Euromed, a 3 days conference-expo in Verona, providing high-end education seminars to a wide variety of attendees. GBC Italia is highly involved in national advocacy activities, supporting public administrations (as the Government and relevant public bodies) to promote sustainable buildings.

In summer 2017 the European Commission launched a region-wide approach to assessing the sustainability performance of buildings, and recognized the leading role that European GBCs has played in establishing this groundbreaking new policy. Known as ‘Level(s)’, the policy is helping to move Europe’s mainstream political debate on building performance beyond energy use to wider sustainability issues such as resource and water use, health, resilience and value. GBC Italia actively supported the consultation phase of the project, and held a national workshop together with the DG environment of EU Commission and the Italian Ministry of the Environment to present the LEVELs framework in Italy, to which participated 50 national high level experts in the fields of GHG emissions, building materials, LCC, resource efficiency, indoor air quality, comfort, buildings resilience to climate and environmental hazards.

GBC Italia has also created rating systems for sustainable buildings to fit the Italian market needs and peculiarities relating to the residential sector (GBC HOME), urban areas (GBC QUARTIERI), historic buildings (GBC HISTORIC BUILDINGS) and multifamily building sustainable renovation (GBC CONDOMINI). Certification programmes have already been activated for three national rating systems.

 

GBC Italia worked hardly on advocacy to develop innovative finance for the deep renovation of existing building. We suggested some tools to improve Italian green building policy. In autumn 2016 the Italian government introduced the “Ecobonus” that is a tax deduction (from 65% up to 75%) for interventions of energy-saving on existing buildings. There is also the possibility to sell the credit to banks, lenders, private subject or companies supplying the renovation.

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