Last week jmarchitects attended this year’s #bestfest which was hosted at the beautiful Paisley Town Hall

BE‑ST Fest is the UK’s largest festival championing a zero‑carbon future for the built environment, and we were thrilled members of our Glasgow team were able to take part across both days.

At Wednesday’s BE-ST Fest Summit, our team gained valuable insights from experts shaping innovative solutions to tackle the 25% of greenhouse gas emissions which are accounted for within the built environment. The afternoon offered workshops covering projects untaken within the construction industry looking to tackle net-zero goals, their challenges and most importantly the valuable lessons learned in the process which the industry can grow from.

The International Retrofit Conference on Thursday discussed the practices that the construction industry can adopt through retrofitting to help achieve Scotland’s 2045 Net-Zero target with 80% of the buildings today, still to be in use by 2050. Our team heard from Keynote speakers covering a variety of processes to monitor and develop retrofit typologies and the panellist’s discussion on the success and challenges behind the build of Scotland’s National Retrofit Centre. The afternoon covered a number of valuable workshops covering projects utilising environmental standards including EnerPHit and Passive house. We even got some hands-on professional development with a taster session of the CITB Low Carbon Passport project which aims to bridge the gap in skills around low-carbon technologies in Scotland.

It was an eventful and packed two days which also featured a great opportunity to catch up with our valued colleagues and collaborators across the industry. We have all left with a refreshed enthusiasm to play our part in tackling net-zero. 

Credit: Victoria Scott, jmarchitects