"1,5 de­grees is still pos­sible!"

All the key­note speak­ers at the 23rd In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Con­fer­en­ce in Gaobeidi­an un­an­im­ously agreed that put­ting "en­ergy-ef­fi­ciency first" was ne­ces­sary to achieve the cli­mate ob­ject­ives of the Par­is Agree­ment. As a mem­ber of the In­ter­gov­ern­ment­al Pan­el on Cli­mate Change (IP­CC), the en­vir­on­ment­al sci­ent­ist Di­ana Ürge-Vor­satz high­lighted in her key­note speech that Ju­ly 2019 had been the warmest month since tem­per­at­ure re­cords began. However, there is some good news: "Even though many may not be­lieve this, the ob­ject­ive of lim­it­ing glob­al warm­ing to 1.5 de­grees is still achiev­able, but only with great ef­fort. Time is run­ning out!"

The politi­cian and co-pres­id­ent of the Club of Rome Pro­fess­or Ernst Ul­rich von Weiz­säck­er em­phas­ised the ne­ces­sity for sig­ni­fic­antly re­du­cing the en­ergy de­mand and re­ly­ing on cli­mate-neut­ral tech­no­lo­gies in­stead of new coal-fired power plants. He is also in fa­vour of in­creas­ing the price of en­ergy an­nu­ally.

Fu­ture pro­spects

In his in­aug­ur­al ad­dress, the Chair­man of the Chinese Pass­ive Build­ing Al­li­ance, Pro­fess­or Xu Wie, re­ferred to the 13th Five-Year Plan for the peri­od 2016 till 2020, in which the Chinese Min­istry of Con­struc­tion stip­u­lated the low-en­ergy stand­ard for the first time and thus laid the found­a­tion for en­ergy ef­fi­cient con­struc­tion in China. He out­lined China's goal for con­se­quently re­du­cing the en­ergy de­mand of build­ings to nearly zero.

Zhang Xiaol­ing, Dir­ect­or of the Beijing Kan­qiju Cer­ti­fic­a­tion Cen­ter, ex­plained that Pass­ive House build­ings im­proved the health and liv­ing stand­ar­ds of the Chinese people. The main chal­lenges now were qual­ity con­trol of the build­ings and fur­ther train­ing for con­struc­tion pro­fes­sion­als.

Ex­cur­sions

The third day of the con­fer­en­ce al­lowed the vis­it­ors to par­ti­cip­ate in dif­fer­ent ex­cur­sions to ex­cit­ing Pass­ive House pro­jects in China: The biggest Pass­ive House de­vel­op­ment "Rail­way City" and oth­er Pass­ive House pro­jects in Beijing, Zhouzhou and Baod­ing. Dur­ing these ex­cur­sions, the groups vis­ited apart­ments, of­fice build­ings as well as the Pass­ive House mu­seum in the Rail­way City. Throughout all tours, a trans­la­tion ser­vice to Eng­lisch and Chinese was provided.

After the con­fer­en­ce, it was pos­sible to take part in the Pass­ive House Open Days Tour and vis­it even more Pass­ive House pro­jects.

Work­shops

Be­sides the series of 20 lec­ture series re­lat­ing to world­wide Pass­ive House pro­jects, the con­fer­en­ce pro­gramme was com­ple­men­ted by 14 work­shops. Even be­fore the con­fer­en­ce had of­fi­cially be­gun, the Pass­ive House In­sti­tu­te offered Ba­sic Work­shops in Chinese ex­plain­ing the plan­ning tool Design­PH and the Pass­ive House pro­ject plan­ning tool PHPP. After the con­fer­en­ce, the Ad­vanced Work­shops covered a vari­ety of top­ics like air­tight­ness, de­hu­mid­i­fic­a­tion or win­dows for Eng­lish speak­ers. The Sin­fonia work­shop ex­plained cli­mate pro­tec­tion on a dis­trict level. Ad­di­tion­ally, pro­fes­sion­als were able to take part in a Train-the-Train­er course, spe­cif­ic­ally de­signed for course pro­viders that teach cer­ti­fied Pass­ive House Planers and Trades­people.

Thank You!

We are in­cred­ibly happy and thank­ful for this con­fer­en­ce week and all the things we learned and shared. It is an ex­hil­ar­at­ing ex­per­i­en­ce to meet so many people that are pas­sion­ate about build­ing en­ergy-ef­fi­cient houses and im­ple­ment­ing these build­ing stand­ar­ds for a bet­ter and more sus­tain­able fu­ture.

We want to thank all the speak­ers, ex­hib­i­ti­ors, sup­port­ers, and, of course, all the vis­it­ors of the 23rd In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Con­fer­en­ce. All of you made this con­fer­en­ce truly spe­cial!

We are already pre­par­ing for next year and are look­ing for­ward to see­ing you at the 24th In­ter­na­tion­al Pass­ive House Con­fer­en­ce in Ber­lin!