Strategies for Achieving Sustainability in the Nigerian Building Design and Construction Industry A. Mohammed 1 and M. Abbakyari 2 Civil Engineering Department, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, PMB 0248, Bauchi, Bauchi State, Nigeria 1 MSc Candidate in Architecture & Sustainability, De Monfort University, Leicester, UK 2 1 agmohammed@atbu.edu.ng 2 mabbakyari@yahoo.com Abstract Sustainable development has been in the forefront of debates because of the far reaching effect of climate change on this earth. This is principally due to the activities of industries that pollute the atmosphere and use up non-renewable resources to fuel our growth and development. As a consequence of this, it has become necessary for all major consumers of resources including the building industry to adopt sustainable development measures as a way of prudently using our scarce resources. Nigeria does not have a sustainable development action plan that encapsulates strategies for attaining sustainability in the built environment. This is an attempt at proposing some strategies of achieving sustainable building design and construction focusing on the principles of sustainable design and construction and the technologies for their achievement. These strategies revolve round the five principles of Sustainable Site Design; Water Conservation and Quality; Energy and Environment; Indoor Environmental Quality; and Conservation of Materials and Resources. Keywords: Sustainability, buildings, climate change, environment, energy. 1 INTRODUCTION Climate change is real, it is happening now, affecting us more and will impact us greatly until urgent and holistic interventions are carried out to mitigate as well as to adapt to its disastrous consequences. This is the summary of the much anticipated report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013). This implies that how we live and impact our environment has a direct bearing on the quality of life we live as individuals and societies. This explains the drive towards more energy efficient and sustainable resources, materials and processes in order to preserve our fragile ecosystem in light of the climate change question. The main culprit in this change is attributed to emissions from fossil fuel based industries which has given rise to the greenhouse effect and resulted in a warming of global temperatures and altering the weather pattern all over the world (Mohammed et al, 2011). One of the consequences of global warming is seen in desertification. Deserts worldwide have grown by over 50% between 1980 and 2000, affecting energy demands for cooling, increasing water consumption to compensate for rising evapotranspiration, and raising morbidity and mortality in regions adjacent to deserts, and even rather far away from them (Meir and Pearlmutter, 2010). The importance of buildings to our lives cannot be over emphasised because it is estimated that we spend 90% of our time in some form of building; as a home, office, school, leisure centre etc. (Plank, 2005). As a result of this, the building industry is the biggest energy consumer in the society using up about 40% of all energy produced, through the manufacture of building materials like steel and cement, construction of buildings and their eventual demolition. Additionally, almost 60% of the world’s electricity is consumed in residential and commercial buildings (Berge, 2009). A breakdown of energy use in tropical buildings is shown in Figure