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| Tue, 4th Feb 2020 14:39:00 |
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Beyond Net Zero |
The United Nations’ Integrated Panel and Climate Change (IPCC)’s Summary for Policy Makers released in October 2018 outlines the immediate measures required to limit global warming to 1.5 °C by 2100. To achieve this target, global action would require “rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities,” to cut the net emissions of CO2 by half of current levels by 2030, and reaching “net zero” by 2050. This announcement is a call to collective action unlike any in human history. It inherently requires global cooperation for an issue that has no borders, and whose constituency is absolute. The complexity of this challenge is immense—an overwhelming problem too large and interconnected for any one entity to grapple with.
For us in the construction industry—whose work cuts across these six sectors: land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities—this complexity is further compounded by a systemic illiteracy of the direct and indirect impacts our decisions and specifications have from cradle to gate. Our focus on “sustainability” and operational energy has exacerbated this issue via the unintended consequence of both delaying our investments into reducing embodied energy and, arguably worse, building a globalized supply chain to enable energy efficiency. While we now have a firm grasp on the U-Value of a casement window, we know little to nothing about how that window was made, by whom, from what, and from where.
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