CEBE - Civil Engineering and the Green Transition in the Built Environment
SDU Civil and Architectural Engineering participates in the research programme CEBE – Civil Engineering and the Green Transition in the Built Environment, funded by the Villum Foundation, a ten-year research programme that brings together leading researchers from four Danish Universities.
Project Description
The CEBE Research programme is divided in seven Research Fields. The Section for Civil and Architectural Engineering plays a major role in three of the Research Fields:Research Field 2 - Design for regeneration, circularity and longevity
Christian Koch from SDU Civil and Architectural Engineering is co-lead of Research Field 2. The research challenge of the field is how civil engineering can support the green transition of the built environment through design for regeneration, circularity, and longevity.
The RF vision is to establish a new scientific and practical paradigm for designing buildings with environmental impact that enables the regenerative properties of the planetary ecosystems to reestablish the safe operating space below the planetary boundaries. The field aims to enable the building industry to design and construct buildings and building systems for repeated circularity, enhance biodiversity, and remain resilient over time and under future climate conditions.
This RF will develop research-based methods, processes, and solutions for building design, long-lasting and circular building systems, and construction management with a low environmental impact. Through interdisciplinary research, experimental testing, digital design methods, and co-creation with industry and international partners, the field will generate knowledge that can be implemented in practice. In this way, the research field will accelerate the transition toward long-lasting and circular buildings and urban environments with a regenerative environmental impact.
Research Field 7 - Extending the life of the built environment
Henrik Brøner Jørgensen from SDU Civil and Architectural Engineering is co-lead of RF7. The research challenge of the field is to enable safe, reliable, and resource-conscious performance, well beyond original design life span through science-based, risk-informed, and sustainability-driven approaches
The RF vision is a built environment in which extending the service life of existing buildings and infrastructure becomes the preferred pathway.
This RF will develop an interdisciplinary framework for lifetime extension by quantifying deterioration and capacity, forecasting climate-driven demands, creating adaptive retrofit solutions, and delivering transparent risk-and-reliability-based sustainability-informed decision support that integrates structural health monitoring information.
Research Field 4 - Digitalisation and automation
SDU Civil and Architectural Engineering participates with projects in RF4. The research challenge of the field is how robotics, computation, sensing, digital twins, and interoperable data infrastructures can support circular construction, reduce carbon emissions, improve resource efficiency, and enable lifecycle-informed decision-making.
The RF vision is a built environment that operates within planetary boundaries, where more data leads to less waste, and material use; where construction processes, and building transformation are continuously informed and controlled through reliable lifecycle data; where buildings are conceived as low-carbon, reversible and resource-aware systems, designed for material efficiency, reuse, and long-term adaptability and where construction is organised around traceable material flows, reduced carbon emissions, and automated processes supported by open and interoperable data ecosystems.
This RF will establish the technological foundations for scalable circular construction and low-carbon building systems by integrating computational design and engineering, robotic fabrication, reality capture of the built environment, digital twins of construction operations, and interoperable data infrastructures. The research field will deliver automated prefabrication systems, including 3D concrete printing and robotic timber assembly, as well as robotic deconstruction processes for material recovery, implemented within traceable material flows and lifecycle-informed decision-making across phases.
CEBE Research School
Henrik Brøner Jørgensen from Civil and Architectural Engineering is leading the CEBE Research School in Sustainable Civil Engineering with the purpose of offering cutting-edge training programmes in collaboration with relevant doctoral schools at the partner universities.
The CEBE programme has a strong focus on education of the next generation of engineers and researchers and on building knowledge and research capacity for both academia and industry to drive the green transition in construction. Therefore, an important objective of the programme is to position Denmark as frontrunner in taking the next steps in the green transition in the built environment through scholarly renewal and excellent research-based education.
The CEBE Research school will focus on sector specific multi- and cross-disciplinary activities supplementing the more discipline-focused PhD courses at the existing doctoral schools. The activities developed will support development of all academics hired as a part of the CEBE research programme, including PhD students, postdocs and Assistant Professors, but will also invite participants from national and international universities and companies to participate.
Financing: Villum Foundation
Period: January 2026 – December 2035