CLIMATE-POSITIVE FUTURE

Kelly Alvarez Doran, MASS Design Group, Rwanda & UK “Climate-positive design represents a mindset shift from a focus on sustainability via operational efficiency towards a more holistic view of buildings (and the built environment) in their totality and across their entire life cycle. All buildings, existing and future, need to first address the

‘question of half’ posed by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – that is, how are we going to halve emissions this decade? To answer this, we need to see the building as part of a larger system of exchanges.

For existing buildings: How is the energy it draws upon generated and transmitted? How green is your grid? How reliant on fossil fuels is your building’s heating, cooling and power? From a materials perspective: What is the provenance of the materials you employ? What is their ecological and social footprint? Each question has an associated footprint and handprint, and the answer to the climate crisis is both ecological and social.

Ed Mazria, CEO of Architecture 2030, talks about cities as ‘mountains and carpets’ where city centres dominated by tall energyintensive buildings account for roughly 50 per cent of emissions, while the carpet of lower-rise residential areas account for the other half. Beneath these two areas is the urban fabric that largely exists to support our movement between them. An urban fabric that encourages nonfossil fuel-based transport, public transport and evapotranspiration is one that can begin to help erode these mountains.”