According to environmental statistics, the construction industry is one of the biggest pollutants of the environment. Given the current climate crisis and the rise of global warming, it is of essence that each country adjusts its construction norms in order to address this concern. In fact, many of the EU and North American countries have already introduced strict legislation and have developed different methods of sustainable design strategies in order to minimize their environmental impact. However, most Western Balkan countries are still behind in this regard. For this reason, this paper will focus on the improvement of building practices in the construction of single-family houses in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) based on the existing EU practices. The paper examines three predominant climatic zones present in BH and offers improvement strategies based on each of the climatic specificities. The goal of the paper is to create a guideline for creating more sustainable single-family architecture in BH which will decrease the construction pollution in the country but also provide energy savings for the end users in the long run. It is the hope that further down the line, these strategies will also be applied to other building typologies.

Keywords : Sustainable design, single-family home, passive design, energy efficient, sustainable construction, environment.