Nigel Tonks, sustainable development leader at Arup and senior adviser to the UN High Level Champions Built Environment Team, outlines the key lessons from COP26 and reasserts the urgent need for the industry to work together to accelerate decarbonisation.
Demonstrators at COP26 call for faster action to tackle climate change. Image by Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images
As COP26 ends, attention now shifts to how governments, businesses and industries are turning their many promising commitments into action. After two weeks of announcements, ranging from deforestation and investment to climate adaptation, it is now time to absorb the outcomes of this landmark event and start building its legacy.
This conference has marked a breakthrough for the built environment. For the first time since Paris in 2015, the spotlight was firmly on our sector, with the UK presidency dedicating a full day of Glasgow’s packed agenda to cities, regions, and the built environment.
Having our own day at COP26 offered a rare opportunity to bring together the entire industry and encourage everyone to focus collective attention on the challenges at hand. A collaboration between the UN High Level Climate Champions, the COP26 Presidency and the #BuildingToCOP26 Coalition brought together national, regional and city level leaders, alongside the private sector, to demonstrate why the built environment must be prioritised as a critical climate solution that is vital to halving emissions by 2030.
The built environment is responsible for almost 40% of global energy-related carbon Learning from COP26 Nigel Tonks, sustainable development leader at Arup and senior adviser to the UN High Level Champions Built Environment Team, outlines the key lessons from COP26 and reasserts the urgent need for the industry to work together to accelerate decarbonisation emissions and uses 50% of all materials extracted from the earth. By 2060, it is projected that the world’s building stock will have doubled and almost two-thirds of the global population will live in urban areas. Our sector’s demand for natural resources is accelerating climate change, while inefficient, unhealthy buildings negatively affect human health and wellbeing.
In addition, the sector has a hugely important role in helping the world adapt to ongoing climate change. By 2050, 1.6 billion urban dwellers will be regularly exposed to extremely high temperatures and over 800 million people living in more than 570 cities will be vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal flooding. The link between development of the built environment and emissions that drive global climate change needs to be broken.
Over two weeks in Glasgow, we learned that we still have a long way to go. It is progress that 136 countries have now included emissions from buildings in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), an increase of 55% since 2015. But while this is a significant step in the right direction, many of these countries still fall short of the level of ambition to drive genuine change.
Experts from across the sector discuss sustainability and education at an event hosted by Architecture Today and Medite Smartply at the COP26 House
At Arup, we announced that from 2022 we will begin to undertake whole-life-cycle carbon assessments for all of our building projects. It is vitally important for the industry to understand the true carbon footprint of buildings and find the most effective ways to reduce their impact. In Where do We Stand?, a report conducted with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development earlier this year, we found that as much as half of a building’s whole-life-cycle emissions come not from operational emissions, but embodied carbon associated with construction, maintenance and refurbishment. Whole-life-cycle assessments will identify these impacts and enable us to make verifiable reductions.
While there has been a huge upswing in companies making net zero commitments, it is also clear that by acting alone, none of us can achieve our goals since our outcomes depend heavily on one another. It requires more than each of us doing “our part”. Instead we must work together in radical collaboration to create the market transformation towards a zero-emission, equitable and resilient built environment at scale and at pace. This will be aided by faster and bolder government action but we must not wait.
COP26 House architect Peter Smith educates the press about Passivhaus design
There is considerable room for optimism in our sector, with partnerships across the supply chain bringing commitments that will collectively drive deep collaboration and trigger positive systemic transformation. It was announced that $1.2 trillion in real estate assets under management and 20% of the world’s largest architecture and engineering firms are now in the Race to Zero. More than 1,000 cities and local governments from across the world have joined, representing 722 million people with the potential to reduce emissions by 1.4 gigatonnes per year by 2030. Climate resilience also continues to gather pace, with Race to Zero’s sister campaign Race to Resilience, formed in January, aiming to reach 200 member cities next year. These successes are major initiatives that can make a difference and give us cause to believe significant improvements can be made.
While much of the focus in Glasgow has been on the diplomatic summit, we must not ignore the demonstrations also taking place. In particular, I have been struck by the passion of young people and people living in vulnerable environments, who have been leading the calls for faster action to tackle climate change. Their concerns must be addressed. We all have a role to play in doing what’s possible to accelerate action.
