On the occasion of COP26, CEN and CENELEC released the new policy paper “Uniting the world to tackle climate change: COP26 and the commitments of European Standards”. In the document, the two European Standardization Organizations reaffirm their commitment to contributing to the fight against climate change and raise awareness on the actions they are taking to contribute to addressing these challenges.

In particular, the policy paper highlights the role of standards in contributing to the green transition: “Standards foster the process of innovation and encourage the faster development of more environmentally friendly technologies and materials. Whether it is by specifying tests or providing robust definitions that avoid misleading environmental claims, standards have a key role to play in addressing the climate emergency.”

Based on this potential, the standardization community stands ready to play their part in ensuring that both Europe and the world are equipped to deliver the social and economic transition necessary to reduce the effects of climate change, while also helping to deliver the infrastructure necessary to increase the planet’s resilience to adapt to its impacts. The full text of the Policy Paper is available here.

The scope of the Workshop is to specify a common reference framework and a methodology that allow to evaluate, score, and report the Level of Competence of professionals and workers with regards to specific Areas of Expertise related to energy efficiency and sustainability at building and urban scale (TRAIN4SUSTAIN Competence Quality Standard). The TRAIN4SUSTAIN Competence Quality Standard framework can be defined as a hierarchical classification (taxonomy), structured into 5 levels, which covers the broad scope of energy efficiency and sustainability of buildings and urban areas and reflects the approaches of the most relevant sustainability certification systems at building and urban scale, including the recent Level(s) framework of core sustainability indicators issued by European Commission in October 2020. The TRAIN4SUSTAIN CQS is a living and extendible system that can evolve over time as it is able to receive new inputs for instance, new areas of expertise related to the development of construction technologies, materials, and methodologies, also fulfilling its “future-looking” mission.

The scope of the Workshop is the definition of a Sustainable Nanomanufacturing Framework (SNF) for sustainability management in nanomanufacturing processes. It sets up the basic requirements to assess the sustainability of a nanomanufacturing plant, allowing drafting improvement plans and monitoring the degree of progress of the nanomanufacturing plant. 

The SNF model deploys the three traditional Sustainability Dimensions (SDs): social, environment and economy. Each SD is divided into several sustainability items (SIs). The SNF allows to diagnose the starting position of a nanomanufacturing plant with respect to the SNF model, at two levels: 1) Sustainability management practices and 2) associate KPIs to measure results. The result of the diagnose is used to elaborate the corresponding sustainability Improvement Plan for the nanomanufacturing plant. The SNF is used to monitor the progress of sustainability in the PL through a customizable dashboard (two radar diagrams, Management and KPIs), which allows intuitive visualization of the starting values and the proposed improvement values improvement baseline) for the period considered, as well as their evolution over time.