[Examiner] Dr. Iliassou Salou Nouhoun at Institut 2iE in Burkina Faso

Last June, I had the privilege of serving as an examiner for the PhD defense of Dr. Iliassou Salou Nouhoun at Institut 2iE in Burkina Faso.

I came away from the defense thinking about a question that matters far beyond Burkina Faso:

What if Europe has something important to learn from construction systems developed under conditions of heat, material scarcity, and severe affordability constraints?

Iliassou's thesis, “Analyse multicritère des matériaux de construction et des bâtiments au Burkina Faso : outils d'aide à la conception,” does more than compare construction materials. It connects embodied carbon, operational energy, thermal comfort, local resources and life-cycle cost.

And the numbers deserve attention.

His work finds that lower-carbon cements using local mineral additions can reduce carbon impacts by 32–36%. Earth-based masonry can have impacts 2 to 18 times lower than conventional cement blocks. At building level, earth-based wall systems reduced simulated cooling demand by 5–20%, while also improving thermal comfort. Some solutions simultaneously reduced whole-life carbon and cost.

But perhaps the most important contribution is not any single percentage.

It is the way of thinking behind them.

For decades, much of sustainable construction has followed a sequence:

improve energy efficiency → decarbonize energy → reduce embodied carbon.

Climate change is making that sequence insufficient.

We increasingly need to ask several questions at the same time:

How much carbon did the material require? How does it behave during a heatwave? Can the building remain habitable without continuous mechanical cooling? Where did the material come from? Can local industries actually produce it? And can households afford the solution over its lifetime?

This is becoming a very European question.

Under the revised EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, Europe is entering the era of whole-life carbon regulation. Life-cycle GWP disclosure starts for large new buildings in 2028 and expands to all new buildings in 2030.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures are turning overheating from a Mediterranean issue into a European building-performance challenge. The European Environment Agency is already calling for greater emphasis on passive cooling and buildings capable of protecting occupants during heatwaves.

Here, research from the Sahel becomes unexpectedly relevant.

Not because Europe should simply copy Sahelian construction.

Knowledge transfer is not copying solutions. It is transferring principles.

One such principle is that thermal mass, air movement, material choice and occupant adaptation form a system. Another is that a material should not be judged only by kilograms of CO₂ per kilogram. Its mechanical performance, thermal behavior, durability, transport, replacement, energy consequences and cost all matter.

A third lesson may be even more fundamental:

There is no truly meaningful LCA without meaningful local data.

Iliassou developed a national life-cycle inventory methodology precisely because imported generic databases can poorly represent local electricity, transport, manufacturing and supply chains.

Europe has far richer environmental databases, but the underlying lesson still applies. As whole-life carbon enters building regulation, the quality and geographical representativeness of environmental data will increasingly determine the quality of the decisions we make.

Perhaps the intellectual exchange between Europe and Africa in sustainable construction should therefore become more reciprocal.

Europe can contribute regulation, industrial capacity, simulation tools and mature environmental assessment frameworks.

African researchers and practitioners are developing knowledge about building with fewer resources, designing for extreme heat, exploiting locally available materials, and balancing carbon with affordability.

In a warming and resource-constrained world, those are not peripheral questions.

They may be among the central questions of architecture in the 21st century.

Congratulations to Dr. Iliassou Salou Nouhoun, his supervisor Prof. Adamah Messan, his co-supervisors, and the entire LEMHaD / Institut 2iE team.

Serving on this jury reminded me why international academic exchange matters: sometimes the greatest value is not transferring a technology from one place to another, but allowing research from another context to change the questions we ask at home.

📚 Read about Dr. Iliassou Salou Nouhoun work: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/2/471

📚 Learn more about our research: https://www.sbd.uliege.be/

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