Materials for a Healthy, Ecological and Sustainable Built Environment

Dr Emina Kristina Petrovic is recognised for her expertise on toxicity, sustainability, and healthiness of building materials. Petrovic emphasises the importance of informed building material selection for both the built and natural environment, calling for a more detailed consideration of building materials for the totality of their impacts, from ecosystem health to ethics of production. By asserting the relevance of the interrelatedness of these issues, Petrovic is providing a critical leadership in a transition to less impactful construction. Because knowledge itself is not enough for the needed change, Petrovic has also contributed a new sustainable transition framework, and examines aspects of behaviour change in building industry.Brenda Vale is an architect and Professorial Research Fellow, at the School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Working with Robert Vale, she wrote her first book on sustainable design in 1975. Following their award winning and energy saving commercial buildings in the UK for which they were both the architects, by 1998 they had designed and built the award winning first autonomous house and the first zero-emissions settlement there. After coming to New Zealand in 1996 they converted an existing house to be zero energy. They also developed the Australian Government's National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS), now in operation. Their current research is in the field of ecological footprints and behaviour, which has led to two published books (Time to eat the dog? the real guide to sustainable living and Living within a fair share ecological footprint).Maibritt Pedersen Zari is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Architecture at the School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate programmes in Architecture, Interior Architecture, Building Science and Sustainable Engineering. Her areas of expertise are biomimicry and regenerative design and the practical intersection of ecology and ecosystem services research within urban and architectural design. She has published extensively in these areas as well as on the relationship between climate change, biodiversity loss and the built environment and responses to these issues. Her publications seek to redefine sustainable architecture and urban design through mimicking ecosystems, changing the goals from sustainable to regenerative development, and integrating complex social wellbeing factors into sustainable architectural design.