Sustainable Energy Systems and Impacts

The concept of sustainability is expanding rapidly to our immediate physical environment. There is an urgent need to improve our skills to make our buildings, communities, cities, and landscapes more sustainable. Green building certifications, smart cities, and smart grids are examples of approaches that should be integrated in the early stages of designing and planning at local, regional, and national level. The benefits obtained from sustainable energy development include: the improvement of the overall quality of life reducing health and safety risks, the improvement of the efficiency in energy and water consumption, the increase of sources to capture carbon dioxide, and the improvement of our capacity of adapting to climate change.