Archial Sustainable Futures, a research, development and advice consultancy, has been appointed to provide a range of advisory and assessment services to the £300m New Campus Glasgow project; the UK’s biggest and most ambitious educational building project – and possibly the biggest in the sector in Europe.

The New Campus Glasgow project will bring together Glasgow’s three city centre colleges to deliver world class learning on a shared super campus. Driven by funders, the Scottish Funding Council in partnership with the three colleges – Central College Glasgow, Glasgow Metropolitan and Glasgow College of Nautical Studies – New Campus Glasgow is the first large project in Scotland’s education sector that will be delivered within the context of the new Climate Change Scotland Act.

As part of its remit, Archial Sustainble Futures is presently working together with a range of potential stakeholders to explore the possibility of integrating New Campus Glasgow with a new heat network in the city through a process of 'heat mapping'.

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John Easton, head of Archial Sustainable Futures, said: "The proposition is that New Campus Glasgow could interconnect with a number of other large energy users in the city centre to share surplus energy. Such heat maps have the prospects of achieving significant advances in sustainable urban development."

Archial Sustainable Futures is providing a range of guidance to the New Campus Glasgow project team, including: advising on the various sustainability targets the team should seek to achieve; what their priorities should be; helping identify benchmarks to work towards; offering detailed design advice on potential environmentally beneficial solutions and assisting the consultation process and planning application approval process.

The firm will also measure the New Campus Glasgow project using the BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) Education assessment, scoring the project against a range of categories including: transportation; water; materials use; energy and a basket of sustainability indicators encompassing environmental, social and economic considerations.

Mr Easton said: "The new Climate Change Scotland Act has established a mandatory legal framework for the control of carbon emissions which will change the agenda for any organisation holding public funds and expending those on buildings or their operation.

"As such, this new legislation will have a major impact on how the New Campus Glasgow project is designed and procured by virtue of the nature of the sustainability solutions that are implemented and how radical they need to be in terms of their performance. It will also impact on how efficiently the sustainability solutions will operate subsequently in order to adhere to our 2020 and 2080 Kyoto Climate Change commitments which the First Minister Alex Salmond has now made legally binding."

(GK/BMcC)