Speaking to Qatar Tribune on the sidelines of the Qatar Sustainable Building Forum which opened on Monday, Axel Michaelowa, senior founding partner of the Zurich-based Perspectives Climate Change, said, "COP 18 will be the biggest climate change conference of this year. The eyes of the world will be on Qatar and everyone will look to Qatar, given that the country has the highest per capita CO2 emissions in the world." To actually start reducing emissions, Michaelowa said the Qatari building sector would be one of the most important players in the field. He said Qatar would have to showcase that it is interested in having a longterm climate policy strategy and not just hosting another event in its long series of international events.
Michaelowa also said that there was so far still no Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project being fully implemented in the country.
The CDM allows a country with an emission-reduction or emission-limitation commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to implement an emission-reduction project.
"In the run-up to the conference, it would of course be highly interesting if the Qatari government would fashion the building sector policy as a pilot activity under the new market mechanism.
But given the big number of new developments in the building sector in Qatar, it would of course be interesting to host a pilot project under the CDM.
According to Dr Yousuf al Horr, founder and chairman of the Gulf Organisation of Research & Development (GORD), who delivered the keynote address at the event, 13 new standards would be added to the Qatar Sustainability Assessment System (QSAS) by the year-end.
Dr Alex Amato, head of research at the Qatar Green Building Council (QGBC), said, "We also need not only to focus on new buildings, but really on how to deal with the existing buildings.
We have to make sure that people get incentives to want to put in the capital investment to improve the existing buildings and make them much more energy efficient.
"About new systems and laws, I think there's a fair amount of discussion and the interest is increasing but still at the moment, we don't have anything immediately in place. But these sort of events raise the agenda and pushes it up towards government attention." The two-day forum which is organised by MEED in collaboration with GORD and QGBC, gathered international experts in the field to discuss how technology can be used to improve building performance and reduce carbon emissions.