EVALOC
evaluating low carbon communities
Oxford Brookes University
Prof Rajat Gupta is Professor of Architecture and Climate Change and Director of the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development in the School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. Prof Gupta is project leader of the £1.14 million RCUK-funded EVALOC project on evaluating the impacts, effectiveness and success of DECC-funded low carbon communities on localised energy behaviours.
In 2005 Prof Gupta brought together disparate fields of energy modelling and spatial mapping to create an RIBA award-winning (2006) model called DECoRuM®, which is able to measure, model, map and manage domestic CO2 emissions on an urban scale. Over the last 15 years, Prof Gupta has been engaged in teaching, research and consultancy activities focussing on carbon counting, low/zero carbon buildings, building performance evaluation, and adapting buildings to climate change. As Principal Investigator (PI), Prof Gupta has won close to £3.5 million in research and consultancy grants to investigate these subjects. He is lead academic on a series of projects funded under the Technology Strategy Board’s Retrofit for the Future Programme to reduce energy use and carbon emissions by 80% for a range of social housing dwellings in UK, which also includes pre-retrofit and post-retrofit monitoring and post-occupancy evaluation.
Prof Gupta is an expert advisor to the UNEP: Sustainable Building and Climate Initiative on the Global Common Carbon Metric project, and also to UNFCCC on CDM methodology for energy efficiency measures for buildings. He was a member of the steering group which developed the BSI’s UK PAS 2060 standard on carbon neutrality. Currently he is a committee member of the Zero Carbon Hub Task Group on Ventilation and Indoor Air quality. Prof Gupta has chaired British Council-funded international conferences on Sustainable energy technologies and low carbon buildings (February 2008) and Greening Events and Energy-efficient Cities for lasting legacies (February 2007) held in New Delhi; as well as the Science Forum of the 2nd International Solar Cities Congress 2006 held in Oxford (April 2006). In 2009 and 2010, he was conference chair of major UK-India conferences on Urban sustainability and Green buildings (May 2009) and Moving towards low carbon buildings in India (2010) held in Delhi, in partnership with RICS India. Prof Gupta is a Visiting Professor in Arizona State University (USA), and a Faculty Associate in the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, University of Oxford.