A new batch of professionals from the construction industry attended the three-day Certified Green Professional training held at the QNCC from 25-27 October 2016. The interactive workshop covered in detail, the various topics of Global Sustainability Assessment System (GSAS) such as its advantages, rating system, framework including categories and their weightage and the different typologies for each type of project.

Thirty-six workshop participants included consultants, researchers, engineers, architects, project managers, sustainability experts and government officials. While most of the professionals were based in Qatar, some joined from the UAE and Belgium.

Commenting on the GSAS, Tatiana Maria Echeverri, Sustainability Consultant from Ceres said,

I work in Abudhabi and I wanted to see how GSAS compares to the other sustainability systems being used in the region. I like how GSAS goes more in detail and has been adapted to the actual country needs. You can tell that they've used other sustainability systems as a pick off and moved on from there and made it their own system which is an excellent idea.

Karolien Maria M. Peeters, the environmental engineer working for a Belgian research organization Vito providing another perspective commented,

My interest in GSAS is perhaps different from other participants as I'm not doing it for a project certification, but we are involved in research working with GORD on the lifecycle assessment of construction materials and we will be using what we learnt in the workshop for our research. I would say about GSAS that it's a very big asset and nice work done building it for local situations. it is definitely more useful here rather than using a system that has been designed for Europe or the US.

With this workshop, about 1600 industry professionals from across the globe have received the CGP training so far.