Niko Heeren

Buildings and the construction sector are responsible for roughly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. What are the potentials of constructing with wood and what are the pitfalls? Niko's talk will compare the environmental impacts of concrete and wooden buildings on different scales (single building, nation-wide, global) using life cycle assessment, prospective scenario analysis, and material flow analysis. 

Speaker Biography

Niko Heeren is an Adjunct Professor for Industrial Ecology at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology NTNU, a lecturer for Prospective Environmental Assessment at ETH Zurich, and sustainability specialist at the city of Zurich. He also is a Data Editor at the journals Industrial Ecology (link is external) and Nature Scientific Data (link is external). His research focuses on the analysis and forecast of environmental impacts of socio-economic systems, such as building stocks. In his work he often combines methods and tools from the environmental and computational science disciplines to develop, for instance, probabilistic approaches for big data analysis.