Many buildings are now nearing the end of their service life. This applies to both the older houses from the 40's and 50's to the million project houses that did not prove to be as sustainable in the long run. Often there is a desire to extend the service lifetime, but to do that you need to make detailed inspections. The Folkets hus in Gävle is one of those buildings that is in need of renovation and to fulfill the new requirements that must be met in today's buildings. It is desired to make the buildings rentable space more attractive and to extend the building with two more floors.

Organic cotton has been in the medias field of vision for quite some time. This interestalso reflects in a growing awareness in the textile industry where more and morecompanies today offer organic cotton in their product range. With this in mind wequestion whether organic cotton has become a viable commercial product. We alsoacknowledge there is a lacking of understanding the complex problems that organiccotton manufacture involves, for example the huge effort and cost required for a transitionfrom conventional to organic cotton farming.The purpose of this paper was to study how textile, ecology and competition today arebeing combined by companies. We wanted with our investigation to find out whethercompanies in the textile industry use ecology as a competitive advantage.

This is a work that look at the factors that affect future monthly costs when buying a house in Sweden and which options are the most financially favorable over a 30 year period. The work also examines whether it is economically beneficial to invest in a low-energy house regardless of geographic location in Sweden, and discuss about whether a calculation template can help individuals to choose more environmentally friendly options. The work has been limited so that a certain number of predetermined factors and its measurable values have been developed with the help of a literature study. The factors chosen are building type, climate, heating systems, loan interest rates, energy prices, energy price increases, inflation rates and down payment. These are then combined into 72 different calculation cases which get put in a calculation model made in excel.

Gothenburg municipality has a lot of natural water. This paper enhances the function and importance of water in the city. It also deals with the problems of sewage water and flooding. Gothenburg has reached an advanced stage of water planning. By developing a Waterplan, the municipality highlight that water has an important position in the urban planning.

SummaryEurope?s public authorities are influential consumers. If they spend their money on greener products and services they can make an important contribution to the work towards a sustainable development. Green public procurement can thereby significantly improve the take-up of new environmental technologies. Through the effects of economies of scale, production costs be lowered and better equip us to fight environmental problems.

It is hard to find streaming waters where humans haven?t affected the fish populations or the running water it self. In many streams the fish populations are over harvested and this results in a lack of older and larger fish. This is also the situation for many populations of Grayling (Thymallus spp.). To be able to develop management plans and to perform actions that improve the situation for the grayling, it is therefore crucial to know what natural, by humans unaffected populations look like.

Stockholm is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Its population is growing every day and the housing needs are becoming higher. Despite the growth and the need for more houses only a few new housing units are being built every year. Critics argue that if the building rate stays as it is today the development of the city will be very limited since there is no capacity for the city to embrace new incomers.The decision makers in the municipality of Stockholm are planning for large investments in housing units for the coming years up until 2030. There are plans of building approximately 140 000 new apartments to mend the ascending need for new houses.Farsta County is part of Stockholm and lies a few kilometers to the south of the city center.

Staden Sulaymaniyah ligger i den kurdiska delen av Irak och har på senare år utvecklats då många valt att flytta från landsbygden till den centrala delen av staden. Nybyggandet sker under tidspress och långsiktigt hållbara lösningar prioriteras inte. Målet är att ta fram ett hus som är anpassat för majoriteten av befolkningen och samtidigt få ett bra och energieffektivt inomhusklimat. En faktainsamling genomfördes för att ge bakgrundsinformation till projektet. Vidare gjordes en planlösning till huset i AutoCAD vilken har använts som grund till utformningen av huset och smarta lösningar.

The goal of this thesis was to explore how real estate investment companies are affected by a weaker world economy. The reason to investigate this was that in the 90s in Sweden, the housing market crashed in conjunction with the bank collapse. Therefore I have looked at how the commercial real estate companies would be affected if we were to have a double dip recession, because it has been confirmed by Gyourko that commercial real estate market and the housing market tend to react in the same way on new fundamental information. This was examined through a sensitivity analysis, one investigated the effect of falling rent income and the second analysis looked at the effect of higher interest costs. I found that IAS 40 rule about unrealized profits of properties affected the results in a significant matter and therefore decided to include the regulation in my thesis.

The enterprises of today are beginning to realize that environmental issues are a important part of their activity. Companies and organizations are expected to a greater extent communicate their environmental work to the world surrounding them in a trustworthy and structured way. Lack of information or information that is incorrect may bring farreaching consequences. Communication is mentioned in several of the ISO 14001-standards. But what is missing is a guideline how companies should act to create and be sure of the quality of the data that can be used in the environmental communication.

The Apollo butterfly, Parnassius apollo, is categorized as Near Threatened (NT) in IUCN Red List. Today in Sweden it is found only in strongly fragmentized populations. In the county of Stockholm, P. apollo exists exclusively in some islands of the archipelago and with one mainland population in Stora Vika. This study has the purpose of expanding the knowledge of the local conditions for the butterfly in the south parts of the county of Stockholm and thereby contributes to a sustainable land management that can preserve the Apollo butterfly.A comparative study was done between areas where the butterfly today have: a stable population (Stora Vika, Utö and Ålö), has disappeared (Muskö and Yxlö) or is strongly declining (north part of Ornö).

Staden Sulaymaniyah ligger i den kurdiska delen av Irak och har på senare år utvecklats då många valt att flytta från landsbygden till den centrala delen av staden. Nybyggandet sker under tidspress och långsiktigt hållbara lösningar prioriteras inte. Målet är att ta fram ett hus som är anpassat för majoriteten av befolkningen och samtidigt få ett bra och energieffektivt inomhusklimat. En faktainsamling genomfördes för att ge bakgrundsinformation till projektet. Vidare gjordes en planlösning till huset i AutoCAD vilken har använts som grund till utformningen av huset och smarta lösningar.

Inom hållbar design har man under senare år börjat härma naturen för att hitta nya lösningar på människans problem. Naturens ekosystem fungerar som praktiska modeller för kretsloppsfungerande miljöer där energi och material tas om hand ? precis som visionen för den hållbara staden. Genom att dels förstå ekosystemets uppbyggnad, dels övergången från ekologi till design, kan man efterlikna ekosystem i den urbana miljön. Designstrategin biomimik är en tillämpning av detta förhållningssätt, där man efterliknar naturens processer i arkitektur.

Urbanisation has increased the distance between the urban and the rural. Urban agriculture can be a solution to overcome that distance. The characteristic of urban agriculture is the intensive production in intra urban and peri-urban areas. Until 1950s food production in cities was an important part of the urban economy and the urban food supply. Since the 1950s the urban located production of food has almost ceased in Sweden, partly as a result of cheap food imports.

The energy sector is facing an impending paradigm shift. Today?s technology enables the end-user to generate their own energy locally at home. Furthermore, recently developed storage technologies make it possible to balance energy demand with stored energy and integrate district heating with the local power grid. This means that in the future heat and electric power will interact and energy flows is converted over energy boundaries.