From transport to telecoms, construction urged to get climate-wise
BARCELONA: Transport, energy and telecommunications networks must be built with clean power, run on it and be better able to withstand disasters if the world is to curb global warming and meet its development goals, infrastructure and climate specialists said.
Researchers estimate that about US$90 trillion will need to be spent globally by 2030 on building and updating infrastructure.
With existing infrastructure today accounting for about 70 per cent of heat-trapping emissions around the world, what is built and how will determine how effectively the world combats climate change, experts told a conference on sustainable infrastructure in Barcelona.
Without more effort to ensure infrastructure uses greener materials and sources of energy, “we will totally explode our carbon budget ... which we cannot allow”, said Christiana Figueres, a former UN climate chief.
Buildings, for example, can be designed to use less energy for heating and lighting while producing their own energy and even selling the surplus to others, she noted.
Those benefits can exceed the extra upfront investment costs, she said.
James Grabert, director of sustainable development mechanisms for the UN climate change secretariat, said much more infrastructure will be required to meet basic human needs, from food and water to housing, particularly in poorer but fast-growing nations.
Building that in a clean way
If we do this right - if we have a low-emissions, climate-resilient approach - not only will we succeed in keeping on a path to lower than 2C or 1.5C (of warming), we are also going to help billions of people. James Grabert, director of sustainable development mechanisms for the UN climate change secretariat
without relying on fossil fuel energy is essential to meet the Paris Agreement goals of keeping global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally to 1.5C, above pre-industrial times.
“If we do this right – if we have a low-emissions, climate-resilient approach – not only will we succeed in keeping on a path to lower than 2C or 1.5C (of warming), we are also going to help billions of people,” he told the event.
Figueres, who is the convenor of Mission 2020, a campaign that aims for global emissions to start falling from next year, said failing to protect infrastructure from climate change impacts, such as floods and storms, would leach away the budgets communities, cities and countries could otherwise spend on ending poverty and hunger.
“We will be in a non-ending cycle of build, destroy, reconstruct,” she said. “In order to protect even the slightest capacity to deliver on the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), our infrastructure has to be highly resilient.” — Reuters