The European building sector is responsible for approximately one third of all energy consumption. A majority of this is used for heating and warm water but the proliferation of cooling systems and the ever increasing use of electrical appliances constitute additional challenges. Furthermore, the use of floor-space per person is still increasing, both for office buildings and private housing. As a result of the recent energy price scare and in conjunction with economic stimulus packages following the financial crisis politicians are currently seeking concepts and strategies to invest into energy efficiency in the building sector.

EU funded research on this subject shows that technological developments are so advanced that virtually any type of new building can be constructed to meet the highest energy efficiency standards and most existing buildings can easily be retrofitted to reduce energy consumption by 50% and more. The ECO-BUILD project, coordinated by the ICCR in Vienna, studied a range of good practice examples and put forward a number of policy recommendations to assist European and national authorities in drafting new energy efficiency strategies. During the upcoming year, the project will analyze the effectiveness of various policy measures. The first project report and the related policy recommendations are available for download from www.ecobuild-project.org

In the framework of the event ‘Open Space for European Research’, both Liana Giorgi and Michael Schmidt received a distinction as “Austrian Champions in European Research” for their FP7 projects EURO-FESTIVAL and SITPRO+, respectively. This is surprising.

The surprise is not that the individuals got the distinction: both are internationally respected scientists with a longstanding experience in their fields. What is, however, surprising is that the conference accompanying the price award in fact excludes social sciences and humanities. Actually, there is not even much space for the “hard sciences”. Instead, the working groups deal almost exclusively with SMEs, medicine, and technology.

Hence, the question remains: do scientists not do research? This is certainly not the case at the European level, where the importance of science in general, and more particularly, of social and human sciences is underlined not just by speeches and communications, but by significant research budgets as well. This should have been noted by the organizers, the FFG (Austrian Research Promotion Agency) and the Austrian Research Dialogue, an initiative of the Austrian Ministry for Science and Research.

This is not because of lack of participation by the social science community. The FFG launched a call for proposals and concepts of workshops and working groups were submitted by the community. However, the proponents were not even informed about the decisions of the organizers – or, what might have been expected, at least thanked by the organizers for their efforts.

It is in this respect surprising that the Austrian SSH community is quite successful in the European Framework Programmes, as evidenced by the distinction of our two colleagues.

Ronald J. Pohoryles

In January 2008, four new projects were launched at the ICCR. In the Alpine Traffic Management System project, co-ordinated by TNO Mobility and Logisitics in The Netherlands, the ICCR is partner together with Transport & Mobility Leuven.

The ICCR co-ordinates the Art Festivals and the European Public Culture (EURO-FESTIVAL) project, which runs for three years.

In the projects Raising citizens awareness and appreciation of EU research on sustainabletransport in the urban environment and Strengthening the role that Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH) have on the ERA Development the ICCR is also partner.