How can we do better for our planet, our colleagues and ourselves?
Research by Foster + Partners and collaborators has revealed that current guidelines for sustainable design don’t go anywhere near far enough to effectively reduce emissions to a level that would prevent catastrophic atmospheric warming. So where to from here for built environment professionals?
By the World Green Building Council’s measure, buildings and construction are responsible for 39 per cent of all of the world’s carbon emissions,1 with operational emissions (from the energy used to heat, cool and light buildings) accounting for 28 per cent, and embodied (or ‘upfront’) carbon emissions associated with materials and construction processes accounting for the rest.
There have been calls for the upper limit on global temperature change to be revised down from the 2ºC above pre-industrial levels slated by the UN Paris Agreement to 1.5ºC. These calls were reinforced in 2018 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its ‘Global Warming of 1.5ºC’ report.2 The urgency of reducing carbon emissions is clear. But are the built environment industries going far enough in seriously addressing the challenge?
Over the last five years, Foster + Partners (with collaborators) has devoted considerable attention to the matter, undertaking a study of built environment sustainability guidelines around the world, determining equivalencies and finding shortcomings. It was found that even if all new and existing buildings were designed or refitted to comply with best practice, as set by the many international certification bodies, global temperatures would still rise by 3ºC. An even worse prospect, ‘business as usual’ would result in an atmospheric temperature increase of around 4.2ºC.
“With that awareness, you’d find yourself dropping out of the guidelines that everyone in the built environment has been working to,” said David Nelson, Co-Head of Design at Foster + Partners, when we spoke during his visit to Singapore in the latter part of last year. He was in town during Archifest for the Singapore Institute of Architects Conference 2019, where he was the keynote speaker. “So what do you do next? That was the question we asked ourselves. You can wait until the existing guidelines are transformed and catch up – but that’s a three-to-five-year period; you need to get a lot of people to agree to the changes,” he said. Even then, there’d be no guarantee of adoption. “So we decided to find a way of calculating carbon for ourselves.”
A New Evaluation Methodology
Existing certification systems, Foster + Partners’ research revealed, focus on operational energy but don’t fully address the implications of embodied carbon emissions resulting from the energy required to construct and maintain a building. Foster + Partners’ own evaluation methodology attributes a greater proportion of carbon emissions to embodied carbon – the amount being dependant on location and access to clean energy supplies for manufacturing as well as operations.
By way of example, figures from Foster + Partners’ own projects (which were calculated over a 60-year life span) indicated a percentage split of embodied carbon emissions to operational carbon emissions of 57:43 in the Middle East, 67:33 in the UK,
74:26 in Australia, and 81:19 in Argentina. Such insights, suggests
Foster + Partners’ newly launched sustainability manifesto3, enable judgements to be made early in the design process about how to best reduce carbon emissions.
On current projects, Foster + Partners are quantifying embodied energy using BIM processing or bills of quantities, or a combination of both. Measurements are made by dividing each project into seven components: setup (for example, site establishment), structure, façade, building services, fit-out and operations, energy, and transport. These are monitored throughout the design process.
“We look at data banks that have existed for 50 years as a method of calculating eco-footprinting,” says Nelson.
The other part of the picture, outlined in the firm’s sustainability manifesto, is the need to offset the carbon emissions associated with buildings. Even with the most carbon-efficient design, says the manifesto, it is currently impossible to reduce carbon emissions to zero mainly because today’s energy sources are not yet fully renewable. By way of demonstration, Foster + Partners has been purchasing 100 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources for the past three years. It is also offsetting its annual global carbon emissions associated with transport (airline and vehicular), as well as emissions tied to heating and waste from its London campus.
The Evidence For Buy-In
The firm is now offering its methodology to all future clients.
“We probably have about 20-plus projects now going through this process,” adds Nelson. “It’s not something you can do overnight, but we’re presenting our findings to clients more and more. You need evidence to do that. There’s enough there, and we can explain it in detail to people.” And there are ever more willing ears. In December 2019, Foster + Partners was invited by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN Environment Programme and the European Commission to present its sustainability manifesto at COP25 in Madrid.
And according to Nelson, there are willing pockets as well. “There’s an awful lot of money out there,” he says, “and most of the major banks are trying to get people to invest in sound projects.
But the amount of money available cannot get invested because there’s no clear route – particularly in our sector – to go all the way through a project with due diligence. We feel now, with our method of calculation, that we have better due diligence in the process. It can be checked. It can be questioned. The data can be examined.” Investment in offsets will complete the circle, he says.
In reality, architects and designers don’t have the power to mandate the changes to built environment practices that climate projections demand. “But maybe we can influence and appeal to the intellect of people,” suggests Nelson. “We have a responsibility to do something.”