The suite of learning resources here aims to demystify key sustainability concepts and create a common language for non-technical experts to confidently get involved in sustainable building topics.

Using jargon-free, easy-to-understand language, UKGBC’s Bitesize Learning provides a jumping-off point for non-sustainability professionals to begin their sustainability learning journey.

Our learning resource have been split into topic areas to make them easier to navigate.

On this page

• Discover the new set of finance guides
• Net Zero Carbon
• Nature, Resource use and the Circular Economy
• Resilience
• Sustainability across the Value Chain
• Retrofit

What’s available?

Alongside infographics, definitions and fact sheets, we also have the following 1 and 2 page guides:

Explainer Guides (1-page) break down key climate and nature topics into digestible chunks outlining:

• How it is defined.
• Its importance in tackling the climate crisis.
• How it relates to the built environment.
• Relevant resources to consolidate knowledge.

Practical Guides (2-pages) detail sustainable building across the value chain outlining:

• Key principles.
• Practical approaches for stakeholders.
• Case studies to bring the approach to life.
• Further resources to continue learning.

New Climate Finance Guides

Net Zero Carbon

Net Zero & Whole Life Carbon

Carbon Pricing, Carbon Offsetting & Renewable Energy

Nature, Resource use and the Circular Economy

Explainer and Practical Guides

Factsheets & Infographics

Something missing? Tell us what else you would like bitesize learning on via this short feedback form.

Using these guides

If you’d like to use these guides within your organisation, please contact Learning@UKGBC.org

Want to learn in a different way?

Sustainability Essentials for the Built Environment Email Course

Build your sustainability knowledge through this informative email-delivered learning opportunity.

Learn more

So What Can I Do? UKGBC Video Guides to Sustainability

This video series will help you understand sustainability in the built environment – and identify what role you can play in its transformation.

Learn more

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UKGBC’s Knowledge Hub reveals the extent to which the UK’s built environment remains deeply reliant on ecologically destructive and socially hazardous processes for many of its most common materials.

The industry-leading resource is the first output of UKGBC’s Embodied Ecological Impacts (EEI) Task Group, convened earlier this year, which aims to mainstream a more holistic approach to understanding, measuring, and reducing the built environment supply chains’ impact on nature and biodiversity.

Similar to embodied carbon, which has become a consensus metric used across the industry as a critical measurement for enacting the ‘whole life carbon’ approach critical to reaching net zero, the EEI Task Group is working to develop and mainstream more effective tools like Embodied Ecological Impacts for transforming how the built environment is designed, constructed, and used to halt and reverse nature’s global decline. The Knowledge Hub is the first step in building greater awareness of EEI across industry.

Embodied Ecological Impacts

The impact of the materials we use in our built environment is not limited to carbon emissions. This knowledge hub explores the global ecological impacts of the building materials we use in the UK, and how to avoid harm and maximise nature-positivity.

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As homes, buildings, infrastructure, and physical assets around the world face increasing risk from more frequent and severe climate-based threats, UKGBC has today published a landmark review of the strategies and processes that asset-owners can use to adapt and enhance their climate resilience.

The Physical Risk Assessment Labs, convened under UKGBC’s Resilience & Nature Programme and with support from our Programme Partners, has compiled a series of case studies, reflections, and critical insights that will enable asset-owners to more effectively measure, report, and adapt to climate-based risks to their physical assets.

The project has also produced a Compendium of Experience that couches the framework in real-world examples of climate-based risks provided by UKGBC members, to ensure that the industry can undertake their own assessments based on insights into real-world case studies.

Resilience & Nature Partners

Our climate change adaptation work is supported by our Resilience & Nature Partners.

Climate Change Adaptation

As the climate crisis intensifies and extreme weather events become more common, the UK’s buildings, cities and critical infrastructure, and the communities that use and occupy these, are in increasing danger. It’s vital to address how our buildings and infrastructure can be adapted to remain fit for the future.

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Biodiversity Net Gain Definitions

Access our list of almost 30 definitions on key topics that will help you navigate biodiversity net gain with more confidence.

Explore here

Biodiversity/ Environmental Net Gain

Embracing and adding to biodiversity on site is vital as we work to reverse the biodiversity crisis.

View more

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As we embarked on this journey in the year that COP26 was being hosted in the UK, the theme for our journey is around the Conference of Parties, and those people and nations having an impact in this space. 

So, we begin our journey in Paris. Host to the pivotal COP21 where world leaders committed to restricting emissions to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  Click on the link below to see the 10 case studies from Paris, ranging from re-purposed basement car parks to roof-top farms, social housing to the green future of the Champs Elysee. 

From Paris we cross the Atlantic to the Central American nation of Costa Rica, home to one of the key figures in negotiating the Paris Agreement, Christiana Figueres. Long renowned for having got rid of their army following their civil war, and allocating the spending instead to health and education, Costa Rica is also now the poster child for recovering biodiversity.  Have a look at the 10 case studies from across Costa Rica via the link below. 

But Costa Rica is not the only nation in the region forging forward. We couldn’t help adding in these inspiring examples from Mexico, Columbia and Brazil as a small bonus edition: 

Continuing our journey we cross into the Pacific Ocean and sail westwards passing the Galapagos Islands where Darwin sailed on the Beagle and came up with his theory of evolution, passing through French Polynesia with 118 atolls spread over 2,000km and on to Kiribati, one of the poorest nations in the world, very vulnerable to climate change and one of the ‘Alliance of Small Island States’ campaigning for equity in combatting climate change, eventually reaching Shanghai on the east coast of mainland China. 

China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases but also the nation transitioning most quickly to becoming a leader in implementing sustainable technologies.  Here we explore Sponge Cities transforming their waterways to mitigate the impacts of climate change and population growth, cities with fully electrified bus networks, 10-storey buildings built in a day, along with more ‘conventional’ BREEAM certified commercial buildings.   

Our journey continues in January to stop in Australia, a nation whose government is reluctant to let go of the wealth generated from ����’s resource extraction industries (most notably coal) but whose property sector is nevertheless throwing up exceptional examples of sustainable design and building. 

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Get involved: We are searching the built environment for initiatives on social value to add to our actor and resource map. If you have worked on or know of any initiatives to add to our map, then please email sophia.cox@ukgbc.org

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For the built environment to become fully circular it must collectively act to share information and work together to create the change required. UKGBC’s mission is to work together for a better built environment, as such we have created a web-based actor and resource map of initiatives within the built environment around circular economy. The purpose of which is to allow organisations to use existing knowledge and methodologies to successfully implement circular economy principles without repeating the work of others.

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The manual has been designed to promote a culture of innovation in the built environment sector, and more specifically to aid the generation of solutions that are both sustainable and innovative.

Download the Sustainable Innovation Manual here

We have also developed templates designed to accompany the innovation process set out in the Sustainable Innovation Manual and to guide you towards the creation of a sustainable solution to challenges you have identified.

They are intended to be used in a workshop format but can equally be used and applied by an individual to any challenge, as a way to frame and organise thoughts.

Download the Sustainable Innovation Templates here

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The core content is a ‘Policy Playbook’ which focuses on energy & carbon, mitigating overheating risk, and the cross-cutting issue of assuring performance. There is also a section on viability and a set of case studies.

This project is part of the Cities Programme.

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‘Wellbeing Labs’ are collaborative learning programmes, in which multi-displinary teams come together to commit to taking action on health, wellbeing and productivity in their buildings, and crucially share the experience with their peers.

Wellbeing Lab: Offices

We launched our first ever lab in 2016, which focused on the office sector and which culminated in this output report in April 2017, described as a compendium of the teams’ experiences.

Wellbeing Lab: Retail

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