About Us

The challenge

Buildings and the infrastructure that supports them are the fabric of our modern landscape. They influence our daily lives, whether at work, home or during our leisure time. They are also responsible for a significant proportion of our green house gas emissions and are major consumers of water, timber and other materials. This has a massive impact on our contribution to climate change and other environmental problems both in the UK and around the world.

The sector now has the opportunity to be at the forefront of finding solutions to these problems - solutions which are not only environmentally sustainable, but have positive social and economic effects.

Background to the UK-GBC

The UK Green Building Council (UK-GBC) was launched in February 2007 to bring cohesion to the green building movement. The Government's ‘Sustainable Buildings Task Group’ had earlier reported that no one body or organisation concerned with sustainability was providing clear direction for the sector as a whole. The UK-GBC was established to fulfil this role.

We are a campaign for a sustainable built environment and our task is to bring clarity, purpose and co-ordination of strategy to the sector.

We are a membership organisation, consisting of businesses from across the industry, all of whom believe the challenge of sustainability is an opportunity, not a threat. In addition to industry, our members include NGOs, academic institutions and government agencies.

All our members are committed to campaigning for action – by government, by the industry, by whoever has role to play to deliver on our mission.

The UK-GBC is part of the World Green Building Council federation, membership of which is growing as new national green building councils are established across the globe.

What we do

The UK-GBC is helping to forge a new partnership between government, industry and other stakeholder groups. We believe government policy should be ambitious, based on expert advice, and delivered in the most efficient and effective way.

We seek to take a lead role in facilitating dialogue between the sector and Government, always representing a progressive, positive and solutions-led approach.

To help industry and other decision makers play their part in creating more sustainable buildings, both new and existing, the UK-GBC will promote technical knowledge, encourage research and innovation and the spread of best practice.

We aim to complement the excellent work done by others in the sector and identify information gaps that need to be filled.

Roadmap to sustainability

Our main programme of work is based around the interactive UK-GBC ‘Roadmap to Sustainability’ and associated ‘task groups’. The roadmap is designed to provide a shared vision of a sustainable built environment and provides a path for the industry, its clients and policy makers to follow to achieve that vision.

The roadmap brings together government targets, policies and industry initiatives allowing the UK-GBC to set priorities and assess where we can best intervene to bring down the barriers to sustainability.

Interventions will mostly take the form of time-limited ‘task groups’. We believe we can take a clear and comprehensive overview of any issue, by bringing together a wide range of stakeholders and developing an action plan of what needs to be done, and by whom, to solve that problem.

We don't have all the answers. The roadmap and task groups are a framework enabling us to provide the leadership and co-ordination that is needed. It is up to our members to help us populate the roadmap, establish task groups and make progress.