Conference LIFE IP Care4Climate 2022: With successful practices to climate neutrality

Having completed his university studies, Miha Tomšič was employed as a researcher and assistant at the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering of the University of Ljubljana. Since 1998, he has been working at the ZRMK Building and Civil Engineering Institute, where he is the Head of Activities and holds the title of a Senior Development Adviser. As author and co-author, he regularly publishes professional and scientific papers and other works in his field of expertise. He is a member of the evaluation board of the Quality Mark in Construction award and a lecturer in training programmes for independent experts who issue energy performance certificates, energy advisers, energy auditors, energy managers, inspectors and managers of buildings. He is a member of a number of professional organisations, including the Executive Committee of ICOMOS Slovenia, and the Slovenian representative on the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Energy and Sustainability (ISCES). Until 2019, he was a member of the Management Board of the Green Building Council Slovenia. In 2013, he obtained the licence to produce energy performance certificates, and, since 2015, he has also been a DGNB Consultant, a status granted by the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB).

Leandro Madrazo is professor of architecture and director of the research group ARC Engineering and Architecture La Salle, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona. One of the research lines of the group is the development of energy information systems to improve the energy performance of buildings. An example of this research work is the ENERHAT/ENERPAT applications, that which integrate energy performance data with other building information. He has been the coordinator of the FP7 project SEMANCO “Semantic Tools for Carbon Reduction in Urban Planning” (2011-14), which led to the EECITIES platform, and is currently coordinating the H2020 project TIMEPAC “Towards Innovative Methods for Energy Performance Assessment and Certification” (2021-24).

João Bravo Dias is an R&D Engineer at EDP NEW and has been working in EU- projects, namely H2020 projects related to smart cities, smart buildings, renewable energy communities, low energy buildings and renewable energy, such as POCITYF, SATO, and ABC21. He is currently the Site Manager in the Lighthouse city of Évora in the POCITYF project, which aims to create positive energy districts in heritage protected cities.
Before joining EDP NEW, he worked as a researcher at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, working jointly in the Energy and Climate Departments.

João holds a PhD in Meteorology (University of Lisbon, Portugal), in the frame of which he studied the impact of climate change on energy consumption in buildings, as well as the impact of PV production variability on building flexibility. He holds a Master Degree (MSc) in Energy and Environmental Engineering (Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal) and did his master thesis at the Building Physics department at Eindhoven Technical University (The Netherlands).

Josefina Lindblom is working at the European Commission for the DG for the Environment, in the Sustainable Production, Products and Consumption unit. She has been responsible for work on "sustainable buildings" since 2011 and has, inter alia, managed the recent collaborative developments of Level(s), a common framework for the assessment of and reporting on the environmental performance of buildings.
This work is at the heart of the efforts that the European Commission is doing to bring the building sector into the circular economy.

Josefina strives to make life- cycle thinking a key part of the existing European building policy. Moreover, ongoing efforts relate, e.g., to the development of a roadmap for the reduction of whole-life carbon and the inclusion of life-cycle thinking regarding buildings into Horizon Europe.

She holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering Design from Chalmers Technical University, Gothenburg, Sweden, partly conducted at the Institute for Paper Science and Technology in Atlanta, USA.

Dr Marjana Šijanec Zavrl, Assistant Professor, graduated in civil engineering from the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering at the University of Ljubljana, where she continued her career as a young researcher and assistant in the field of architecture and obtained her doctorate in the field of the thermal response of buildings. Since 1994, she has worked at the ZRMK Building and Civil Engineering Institute, where she now heads the Centre for Indoor Environment, Building Physics and Energy. She specialises in the development of sustainable construction. Her interests include energy efficiency and renewable energy sources in new and renovated buildings, nearly zero-energy buildings, and sustainable construction. In recent years she has managed a number of national and international R&D projects in the abovementioned fields (within the framework of H2020, LIFE, FP7, Intelligent Energy Europe, Interreg, COST and EUREKA). She is also the manager of a training programme for independent experts who issue energy performance certificates and a university lecturer in real estate management.

Nataša Gerič Pal, Director of Evitel d.o.o. and owner of the complex Goričke Iže, started her career 18 years ago in commerce. With the help of her team of 14 employees, she added, within five years, tourism and sustainable construction to the retail activities of her company.

As the first house from hemp with a negative carbon footprint was built in the Goričke Iže complex, she often says: “When demolished, it can be used as fertilizer.”

The company’s vision includes sustainable tourism and the promotion and sale of turn-key hemp houses.

Primož Zorec’s professional and managerial experience in various companies has taken him through diverse but at the same time interconnected areas of the construction industry, both in Slovenia and at the international level. Both during his studies and later, he gained a wide range of experience in the areas of design, project management in the energy sector, reconstruction of existing buildings and new constructions of complex buildings. Interdisciplinarity, interconnection and the search for new solutions have always been the challenge and the guiding principle of his work, which is why he has constantly striven for progress, but at the same time also for returning to tradition. All this experience, knowledge and awareness have made him choose his own path and through green solutions he is transferring his knowledge to others.

In line with this vision, the Go Green company offers the market a stronger relationship with natural materials, focusing on hemp and green technologies, and helps co-create the frameworks for sustainable construction in Slovenia and beyond. The company thus sees its mission in comprehensive hemp construction solutions aimed at improving people’s living conditions and at the same time takes responsibility for the environment and the planet.

Mag. Mojca Štritof-Brus, is a lawyer by profession and holds a master’s degree. Since 2005, she has been Assistant Director and Head of the Legal Division of the Housing Fund of the Republic of Slovenia. Before that she was employed at the Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning. She passed the state law examination, attended the second generation of Fast stream training and the European Law course at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and was Slovenia’s representative in the European Commission’s expert group on the EU market for open-ended real estate funds (OEREFs). For 11 years, she was the director of a media company in Ljubljana, where she was involved in media consultancy, publication of professional journals and implementation of European and national projects on media literacy, multiculturalism, the protection and education of national minorities, the functioning of the European Union, the protection of the environment, energy literacy, sustainable development, the protection of cultural heritage, the promotion of equal opportunities and measures in agriculture, and other topical European issues. She is also a lecturer in training programmes and projects in the fields of housing legislation, the functioning of public funds, spatial planning and construction, the protection of the environment, real estate records and the land registry, protection of basic data, and media and energy literacy.

Sanja Burnazović is Head of the Investment Division of the Housing Fund of the Republic of Slovenia. She coordinates and manages the work of the Investment Division in the field of acquisition of public rental housing and public tenders, invitations and programmes in the fields of public rental housing, housing units, sheltered housing and other products of the Housing Fund of the Republic of Slovenia. She is involved in R&D activities associated with sustainable construction, contributing her expertise, insights and experience gained in the projects of the Housing Fund of the Republic of Slovenia and through her work as an expert witness. She also participates in the implementation of the technical requirements for quality housing construction (TPSG): technical requirements in housing construction and digitalisation of construction processes. She disseminates knowledge and writes articles in her field of expertise.

Luka Mladenovič is a researcher at the Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana. His research interests include sustainable mobility, urban planning, walking and cycling in cities and, more recently, the concept of a compact city or a city of short distances. He is involved in a number of European and national projects dealing with integrated transport planning, mobility management, and the promotion of walking and cycling.

Studies: Civil Engineering: Mathematics, Geodesy.
Since 1963 active in practice and research in planning and realization of more than 400 projects in Austria and abroad. He has published numerous publications in professional journals, including 12 textbooks and technical books. He is a member of numerous international and national research organizations.

Aidan Cerar is a sociologist educated at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Ljubljana and the Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. At the Institute for Spatial Policies (IPoP), he works in the fields of sustainable urban development, community practices, space creation and sustainable mobility, with public participation in spatial planning as his primary interest. He participates in research projects and lectures at universities. He is a founding member of the Library of Things (Knjižnica REČI), a social innovation service, and he participated in the development of a new form of support to local initiatives called Outdoors (Zunaj). He is also the co-author of the Integrated Transport Strategy of the Ljubljana City Municipality and a member of the Maja Farol Society for Spatial Issues.

Mojca Balant is a landscape architect with many years of experience in landscape-architectural design, open space planning and transport planning. As members of various project teams, she and her co-authors have received several awards in numerous national and international competitions. Since 2011 she has been employed at the Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia, where she is involved in European and national projects on mobility management, integrated transport strategies, the development of guidelines for sustainable mobility and the integration of transport, and in spatial planning. Her main interests are public open space in settlements, walking and cycling.

Guido PELLIS is an independent Italian consultant collaborating with the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) and the University Consortium for Socioeconomic Research and the Environment. Background: natural sciences, forestry and climate change. Expertise in: ecosystem carbon stock estimates and LULUCF sector IPCC guidelines and their refinement. He has been involved in national and European research projects on land-climate interactions, in the compilation of the Italian National Inventory Reports and on the ICAT project to align the reporting capacities of non-Annex I countries with the new requirements under the Paris Agreement.

Dr Boštjan Mali, Research Associate, Department of Forest and Landscape Planning and Monitoring, SFI
Dr Mali studied at the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana, where he graduated in Forestry. He continued his education at the same university and received his PhD in 2012 from the Environmental Protection interdisciplinary study programme. He has been employed at the Slovenian Forestry Institute since 2007, currently as a research associate in the Department of Forest and Landscape Planning and Monitoring. His work is mainly concerned with the estimation of emissions and removals from land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF), including projections using models. Dr Mali has been involved in the preparation of the National Forestry Accounting Plan, the National Energy and Climate Plan and Slovenia's Long-Term Climate Strategy until 2050.

Emil Cienciala works as the head of Research and Science at IFER – Institute for Forest Ecosystems Research, Jilove u Prahy, and cooperates with the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno, Czech Republic. His professional interests include forestry, forest production ecology, and adaptation and mitigation strategies in relation to environmental change. He teaches forestry at the Faculty of Science of the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice. He has been a national expert for reporting greenhouse gases in the Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector to the UNFCCC and KP for over 15 years. He also acts as a certified sectoral reviewer of national greenhouse gas inventories under the UNFCCC.

Scapelab is an architectural office founded in 2001 by Marko Studen, who graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Ljubljana and received his Master’s degree from Columbia University in New York. Having collaborated with Boris Matić and Jernej Šipoš for ten years, the two became partners in 2018. Scapelab has been awarded the Piranesi Prize Honorable Mention (for Čufar Square, 2005), the Golden Pen Award (for the Slovenska Street Shared Space, 2015) and the Plečnik Award (for the ELES Technology Centre, 2019), among others.

Since September 2021 Agnieszka Romanowicz holds the post of deputy Head of Unit of the LIFE Energy and Climate unit in CINEA, the Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency based in Brussels. The unit is in charge to implement two sub-programmes of the LIFE programme, namely Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation and Clean Energy Transition.

Prior to her current appointment, Agnieszka worked in a number of European Commission departments on issues related to the environment, climate change and agriculture including international research cooperation.

Before joining European Institutions in 2005 she worked as a researcher at Cranfield University, UK.

Agnieszka Romanowicz holds a PhD degree in agricultural and environmental engineering from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium where she investigated the impacts of climate and land-use change on water flow.

Boris Sučić, PhD Elec. Eng.; Senior Expert, Project Manager. An expert in energy and resource efficiency, demand side management, energy planning and optimisation, performance monitoring, and the modelling of energy systems in industry. His research interests are related particularly to the role of sustainable planning in the industrial sector and integration with the urban environment. He has actively been involved in various projects for the public and private sectors in the field of the energy management of buildings, energy and resource efficiency, distributed electricity generation, and environmental protection. He was deputy project manager for the preparation of the National Energy and Climate Plan for Slovenia. Furthermore, he participated in the preparation of Slovenian national programmes in the fields of energy efficiency (National Energy Efficiency Action Plan), renewable energy sources (National Renewable Energy Sources Action Plan), and energy planning (National Energy Programme), and has managed several activities for industry and the public sector (energy audits, energy measurements, consulting, training programmes, etc.).

Laura Saikku is a senior research scientist at the Finnish Environment Institute, Center for Sustainable Consumption and Production, Helsinki, Finland. She has a PhD in philosophy and holds the title of Docent in Environmental Sciences at the University of Helsinki. She currently manages the EU Life project that is implementing climate measures in Finland. Carbon-neutral municipalities and regions CANEMURE last goes on during 2018–2024 with a budget of 15.3 million euros and 22 partner organisations. In her research, she is focusing on sustainability of production and consumption systems using a life-cycle perspective, barriers and enabling factors in implementing a low-carbon circular economy in practice, and the environmental impacts of land use.

Niamh Gibbons, Phd. works on Land Use and Sectoral Policy at the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications in Ireland. She is a civil engineer who has worked in academia, consultancy, the local authority sector and the public sector. She was previously based at the University of Cambridge at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction and was the Course Director for Future Infrastructure and Built Environment. She holds a PhD from University College Dublin and bachelor's and master's degrees from Trinity College Dublin.