CERN’s Green Village and Probono’s Green Building Neighbourhoods – Making Green Greener!
CERN Green Village initiative and the Probono H2020 Project share a common goal of creating sustainable and energy-efficient built environments and demonstrate their commitment to supporting the objectives of the European Green Deal.
The Probono Project, an EU H2020 initiative, having operated for 16 months out of a total of 5 years, is making good progress constructing the ‘Anatomy of a GBN’ – what are Green Building Neighbourhoods; Why are they of Value; How are they Built’? With its 6 Living Labs in Madrid, Porto, Prague, Dublin, Brussels and Aarhus it has built strong and extensive partnerships with European stakeholders gaining valuable expertise in planning and implementing sustainable practices.
Within the CERN Green Village initiative, CERN offers its campus as a demonstration partner in Horizon Europe consortium projects and/or as a testbed for early-stage sustainable solutions or technologies developed by individual organisations and start-ups. In return, partners not only gain access to CERN´s infrastructure, but also to top-level expert personnel and the CERN international network. With 667 buildings, 54 km of roads, underground structures, tunnels, hotels, 110 ha of green spaces, and 400 ha of fields and forests, CERN is a self-governing urban area where over 9000 people work every day. Making them a neutral and ideal location for running single or multi-partner pilots and demonstrations.
The CERN Green Village team hosted several of the 47 Probono partners at their IdeaSquare collaboration space on Friday 23rd June. The workshop presented an opportunity for both initiatives to better understand and learn from their activities and shared aims and objectives. For the CERN Green Village, the workshop gave valuable insights from Probono’s experience, social and technical solutions, and networking opportunities. For Probono, to learn from the experiences of the Green Village initiative and how CERN integrates sustainable practices into its operational activities.
It gave an amazing opportunity for knowledge exchange, between the CERN Green Village initiative and the Probono Project and one that we hope to build on into the future.