A specialist university offering courses in sustainable building is to be established in the East Midlands.

The new-build university, the location of which is yet to be announced, is backed by the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers. It will offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees as well as technical courses on sustainability in the built environment. Construction will begin next year, ready for the university’s first student intake in 2007.

Businessman Tony Marmont, who last week received an honorary fellowship of CIBSE, said: “We want to have global esteem for our role in sustainable development, and hopefully we can achieve that through this university.”

The announcement was made last week at CIBSE’s annual conference, at which the organisation’s new president Donald Leeper called on industry institutions to collaborate in order to drive through reform.

Leeper said: “Think of the impact if we, the institutions could collectively arrive at core values and codes of conduct that respected our individual knowledge bases.”