Conference Themes

"Enhancing Wellbeing in Existential Challenges: Deepening Understanding, Building Resilience"

Significant challenges converge to render the creation and sustenance of green and healthy indoor environments scientifically complex, technologically difficult, resource intensive and economically costly.

Climate change accelerates global warming, airborne and transboundary pollution, and intensity of weather fluctuations; lethargy in decarbonization increases atmospheric carbon dioxide levels; emergence of new and virulent mutations of diseases dominates environmental externalities. Urbanisation and cities densify social contact; synthetic materials intensify exposures with consequent health adversities; interactions among constituents create microbiomes and hemispheres which nature and impact on humans continue to be discovered.

The indoor environment concentrates exposure to contaminants through respiratory, dermal, and mucosal routes, affecting sensory, physiological, psychological, and neurological responses. Endpoints of such causalities include wellbeing, health, and cognitive performance. The consequences on health economics, quality of life, productivity are stakes too high not to be addressed effectively.

Effective and efficient solutions must be guided by scientific rigour that establishes understanding of the nature, causality, and consequences for informed decisions. The capacity and capability to effectively create and sustain congenial indoor environments, as and when needed, at an appropriate resource level has emerged to be the desired resilience that is often elusive.

Deepening understanding and building resilience are twin pillars that advances knowledge to exploit innovation in the indoor environment that enhances wellbeing. Existential challenges are confronted collaboratively by the global scientific community that informs innovation, and technopreneurs offering capacities that foster the continued creation and sustenance of healthy indoor environments against higher odds.

The theme will be strengthened through an exhibition and site visits. The exhibition is expected to attract significant stakeholders of reference, industrial and educational equipment, and services, with digitalization and emerging data applications that has been spearheading the transformation to a more ubiquitous sensing and achievement of resilient facilities. Site visits will be planned around energy-efficient buildings that have attained WELL/Green Mark certification, and industrial research institutes focusing on development of innovations for the indoor environment.