We are pleased to wish everyone in the CIB network a very Happy New Year and to wish everyone a very successful 2026.
Looking back on 2025 you can see our annual review here.
The highlight was the World Building Congress 2025 (WBC2025), our triennial flagship conference living up to the anticipation thanks to great organisation by the team from Purdue University under CIB Immediate Past President Makarand Hastak’s leadership. Over 600 people attended from 43 countries with over 400 papers presented in 126 sessions across four days.
We were delighted to present the Wim Bakens Best Coordinator Award jointly to Jeremy Gibberd (W116 – Smart and Sustainable Built Environments) and Jack Goulding (W121 – Offsite Construction), although devasted to hear just three months later that Jeremy Gibberd had passed away.
WBC2025 also saw the election of the new CIB President for the next three years, Prof. Dongping Fang of Tsinghua University, a historic moment in the history of CIB as Dongping is the first President from China. [Dongping pic?]
In 2025 we also:
- established three new Task Groups (TG125 – Creating an Inclusive Built Environment for Diverse Users’ Needs, TG126 – AI in Construction, and TG127 – Social Value in Built Environment);
- elevated two others to Working Commission status (W124 – Net Zero Carbon Building Design and Construction Practices, and W125 – Accelerating Innovation in Construction);
- established four new Student Chapters (University of Pretoria and Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, University of Newcastle, Australia, and NICMAR University, India);
- hosted over fifty webinars all of which can be viewed at leisure on our YouTube channel;
- presented CIB awards as follows: the CIB Sebestyén Future Leaders Award (Politecnico di Milano), CIB Best Doctoral Research Award (Hongying Zhao, RMIT), CIB Keith Hampson ECR-Industry Award (Arghavan Akbarieh, TU Eindhoven); and awarded CIB Vistas funding to Robert Osei-Kyei et al of Western Sydney University;
- welcomed four new Full members, eight new Associate members and fifteen Individual or ECR members;
- undertook a tour of seven Chinese cities including Hong Kong to promote CIB and invite membership.
Looking ahead to 2026, we have no WBC to enjoy (the next one will be in May 2028 in Beijing hosted by Tsinghua University) but we do have the World Sustainable Built Environment conference to look forward to in June, hosted by RMIT in Melbourne, Australia.
We also eagerly anticipate the following:
- continued membership growth building on the impact in China where new applications from three universities have already been received following our tour in December;
- new momentum from new Task Groups and Working Commissions and also existing ones as over 25% are under new leadership this year, with conferences, already announced including the following:
– W099 – Safety Health & Wellbeing in Construction – https://cibworld.org/construction-for-tomorrow/
– W121 – Offsite Construction – https://cibworld.org/tcot2026/
– W062 – Water Supply and Drainage – https://cibworld.org/cib-w062-maribor-2026/.
- Board meetings in Finland (May) and New Zealand (November), and additional President and CEO visits already in planning to South Africa and Asia.
Don Ward
January 2026
