And I’ll be planting a tree with my daughter at her school this weekend as part of the BBC’s Tree O’Clock campaign to ‘grow a world record’.

Perhaps to coincide with National Tree Week the Forestry Commission (I’m sure they changed their name to Forest Enterprise!) issued a press release stating that if the UK could plant an extra 4% more woodland over the next 40 years we could lock up 10% of the UK’s predicted carbon emissions by the middle of this century.

In the run up to the UN conference in Copenhagen CABE argue that Government needs to shift public spending away from “grey projects, like road building and heavy engineering projects, to green schemes, like street trees, parks, green roofs and waterways”.

The Europeans, particurlay the Dutch with their Woonerf & the Germans, have been doing this for decades. In the UK we have Home Zones but there is no supporting legislation for them. The Government has, however, given it’s support to 12 pilot Home Zone schemes in the UK. So far there’s only one completed scheme!

Actually at home (I work from home) we already do our bit – most of our lighting uses compact fluorescents. The rest are low-voltage halogen luminaires which could be replaced with LED lamps. All of a sudden it seems LED lighting for the home has made a dramatic technological leap in terms of lumen output making them comparable with compact fluorescents (could this possibly be because of the EU ban on incandescents – hmmm?). Apart from having a life time of up to 10 times that of a compact florescent, LEDs do not contain mercury.

I have yet to see LED lighting in action in an interior domestic situation where it is required for brightness and not mood lighting – my only experience of serious LEDs is with my Petzl MYO XP headtouch which I use when I’m out in the mountains and a Cateye light for cycling – the output of both is phenomenal.

There is a great deal the construction industry can do to cut carbon emissions, not just in the embodied energy of materials & the process of construction itself but in designing buildings that minimise energy use over the building’s lifetime. To use a clichéd phrase – it’s not rocket science. Dwellings that rely only on the heat output of human bodies and lighting for heating do exist.

And it’s not just energy usage – we also need to to be addressing other issues such as toxicity of materials & water usage.

With a background of climate and demographic change & the apparent demand for more housing the Government wants a building control system that produces better compliance (at a reduced cost to users!) coupled with a greater understanding of what building control does and doesn’t do so as to better address the challenges of climate change & sustainability.

There’s also a focus on making the building control process easier for responsible builders possibly by widening the self-certification route to compliance. As the document states, the self-certification scheme currently involves areas of low risk but that the scheme could be extended into areas other than structure, fire & drainage.

I’m not entirely convinced myself that this would necessarily be a better way of doing things (I would say that wouldn’t I given that I want to earn a living getting building regulation approvals for people) but I have to say in my time as a builder I’ve never found the building control process particularly onerous or difficult.