Turner & Townsend's Scottish Environmental team are increasingly working with a diverse range of high profile clients; committed to seeking new benchmarks and key innovation for long-term sustainability.

The Scottish Building Standards Agency (SBSA) as an Executive Agency of the Scottish government is responsible for writing Scottish Building regulations and is one such client with a vested interest in understanding how to improve the performance of a building fabric and how using low carbon technologies will impact and reduce CO2 emissions.


Turner & Townsend worked with SBSA on key research to identify an appropriate level of performance for future Building Regulation amendments and considered those techniques which are likely to be adopted by upcoming Scottish developers.

However, the research has achieved much greater geographical penetration and has been used as a comparator against European regulations, including those in Scandinavia.

Their commission with Grampian Housing Association in Glasgow is an equally innovative exercise to consider potential upgrades on existing housing stock with the achievement of two key objectives. First is to eliminate, as far as possible, the technical causes of fuel poverty within the GHA stock by 2016 and the second is to ensure the existing housing stock is sustainable.

Turner & Townsend is working in partnership with the Energy Systems Research Unit (ESRU) at Strathclyde University to develop and implement a Sustainable Development and Procurement Strategy whilst undertaking a cost/benefit analysis of proposed upgrade strategies.

(JM)