Green Campus: Design and Operations for Sustainable Buildings and Infrastructure

Date: October 14-17, 2019

The Habitat team organised a joint training programme titled 'Green Campus: Design and Operations for Sustainable Buildings and Infrastructure' with the Water team from October 14-17, 2019. This course was organised to enable the participating CPWD engineers and architects, estate managers, ULBs from Gurugram District Administration and practitioners on how to embed sustainability in operations and management of campuses or neighbourhood-scale habitats. 

With Day 1 focusing on water, ShivaliJainer of CSE’s Water team engaged the participants on Water Sensitive Urban Design and Planning at different scales, while MahreenMatto demonstrated CSE Tughlakabad Campus's rainwater harvesting and decentralised wastewater treatment systems and brought into discussion key points for operation and maintenance of such technologies. 

Day 2 was dedicated to energy management. Rajneesh Sareen kicked-off the sessions at AAETI and sensitized the participants about the existing regulatory frameworks for sustainability in the built environment. Master ECBC trainer, Akshay Gupta, brought into light several principles of energy conservation in buildings and focused on how to efficiently operate HVAC systems in campuses. Shifting to cross-cutting resource management in campuses, Sugeet Grover presented case studies from different parts of India and discussed their performance across the themes of energy, water, waste, air and land. Rajneesh Sareen sensitized the participants on water-energy nexus and C&D waste management. He then gave an overview on AAETI and it's making as a green campus jointly to the participants of the two trainings taking place at AAETI - Green Campus and Urban Lake Management. This was followed by a combined AAETI campus tour. 

Day 3 commenced with engaging participants on preparing baselines for their respective campuses by Marisha Sharma, Director of MinMec Environment laboratory. Shifting to the next sector in campus operations - waste management - Dinesh Bandela from CSE's Waste team elaborated generator's roles and responsibilities as per the Waste Management Rules 2016. In order to ensure that the participants—especially CPWD Green Committee members present— were able to translate the learnings into practice, Dinesh along with the Habitat team engaged everybody in an exercise to prepare an integrated waste management plan for a hypothetical residential and office complex. In the evening, a field exercise to enable the participants to conduct a visual survey and identify whether a campus is green was conducted by the Habitat team at Kesroli Fort. 

The results of the exercise were presented by the participants in groups the next day, which brought together their learnings from the past three days of training. Bringing focus on monitoring of campuses for sustainability and efficiency, Rajneesh Sareen discussed components of Building Management Systems. He informed participants about existing tools such as green rating systems that combine several sustainability concepts and techniques, and can act as guidelines for uplifting environmental performance of campuses.