Valeska Pack
(she/her)

BSc (Hons) BArch MSc (Dist)

Research student

I have been practising in the building industry for over 20 years in Architecture, Project Management and Environmental Design Consultancy services, working in the UK, UAE, Australia and Portugal. The range of project types I have worked with include sports stadia, arenas, airports, luxury hotels, high rise, commercial and offices, education, high and low density residential, and urban planning. My experience spans across all stages of the project from bidding, feasibility, concept and technical design, building and managing projects, both on the consultancy and client sides.

Having intermittently returned to academia during my career, I have seen the value of the continued learning journey and how new knowledge can greatly enrich industry.

Now that we face our greatest challenge with the climate crisis and considering built environment's enormous impact on global carbon emissions, I have decided to dedicate my time to furthering our industry's knowledge and ability to navigate this crisis by undertaking a PhD with the Welsh School of Architecture and industry partners: Populous Architects. The research will be focussed towards facilitating net zero whole life carbon reduction of the stadium building.

With the construction industry currently responsible for 39% of Global carbon emissions and our current trajectory of 3% increase in carbon emissions to 2030 in lieu of the 42% reduction required to limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C post industrialisation temperatures, there is a necessity to build without carbon emissions forthwith.

The focus of this research is on Stadia buildings and is intended to provide a methodology to enable the application of whole life carbon reduction strategies to facilitate iterative reduction towards net zero carbon emissions of this building type for design professionals.

Such a study is important due to the Stadium being the most energy consuming and potentially inefficient building type due to its estimated 3250-5000 kgCo2e/m2 carbon emissions which far exceed other building sectors.

The research approach adopted will include structured literature reviews to decipher benchmark and case study criteria, boundaries and carbon reduction strategies, in order to proceed to a cyclical testing process for three selected case studies. The findings from this research hope to result in a validated methodology for use in industry.