Here we go!

As mentioned the last time around, this issue of the magazine marks the beginning of the Editorial Campaign, ‘IEQ & Fertility. And we at Climate Control Middle East can already feel the rush of excitement, given the assemblage of some of the most renowned specialists in the fields of fertility and air filtration.

Over the years – and we are nearing 20 as a magazine – we have conducted weighty editorial campaigns, including on District Cooling, IEQ (in schools and healthcare) and the ongoing one on refrigerants. IEQ & Fertility is special, because reproductive health is an intensely emotional issue.

Given the importance, we want to go as deep as possible in unearthing insights that we hope shape new thinking on how to go about creating healthy living spaces across country-wide portfolio of building types.

As readers, as stakeholders, we would like you to go beyond consuming the information presented in IEQ & Fertility; as with any healthy interaction, we would like you to participate in the discussion by coming forward and sharing your thoughts and experiences. Working on multiple building profiles over the years would have given you the kind of granular knowledge and in depth understanding of practical challenges, which in turn would have triggered the impulse to seek out solutions. We would like you to present those solutions towards the desired outcome of applying the most sophisticated approaches across different building types to improve reproductive health.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the classification of buildings is as much based on their age as on their use. For long, the focus of retrofitting efforts in existing buildings has been on energy efficiency, for a large part. True, to aspire for greater energy efficiency aligns with the global aim of reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and, from an economic standpoint, lowering the Total Cost of Ownership, but IEQ can no longer be ignored. We closely experienced the havoc COVID-19 wreaked on our lives. While the pandemic was a profound, intense and highly visible drama that attained epic proportions, fertility-related challenges don’t register as much on radar screens but are no less in importance, as are the impacts of poor IEQ on numerous other aspects of health.

It, therefore, falls upon each one of us to embrace building performance wholly. Sophisticated societies are built on the foundations of plurality.