Guest column: Climate protection is the only answer

Architects, construction companies, property developers, and global manufacturers have all joined forces in pursuit of a single goal: to holistically rethink the construction and real estate industries to protect the climate.

Sometimes it’s the small changes that have the biggest impact. If the building sector is to achieve better climate protection outcomes, the change process needs to begin with planning and construction. The building sector is still responsible for an unbelievable volume of CO₂ emissions: billions of tons of – avoidable – CO₂ are produced around the world as a result of the materials used in the building sector.

Every transformation process begins with questions and, in particular, questioning existing concepts. For example, how can we reduce the overall mass of concrete – and thus cement – used in construction? Is the cement we use produced using renewable energies? In which regions and countries do the building materials we use originate? How high is the recycled content of the building materials we use? These are just a few of the questions that everyone involved in the building sector should be asking themselves.

And for any transformation process to succeed, we also need people to be willing to commit to the change. Many stakeholders – whether architects, planners, investors or developers – are already on the right track and have started to rethink and redesign the construction industry to boost sustainability and stop climate change. The European Smart + Green Initiative (ESGI) was founded to focus this engagement and bring like-minded industry figures and organisations together to pool their expertise, constantly improve technological solutions, and develop modern sustainable materials. This community, in the legal form of a European Cooperative Society, has come together to promote the shared vision of saving the world from climate change. In most cases, improving sustainability does not mean completely reinventing the wheel; much of our old and new knowledge simply has to be applied more effectively and more sustainably. The ESGI’s partners have defined an initial set of fundamental principles to achieve precisely this. What’s more, these principles are vital if we are to establish a common definition of a sustainable construction and real estate industry before moving on to consider other, more specific issues, such as materials databases and deconstruction capabilities.

Principle I: Efficient and Sustainable Planning

Simply by optimising the way we design buildings, we can create a good five to ten per cent more usable space, for example via improved building geometry, the omission or optimisation of shafts and other building components, and, in particular, by installing thinner and more efficient walls. Each of these measures also has the benefit of saving materials, making buildings lighter overall and, in many cases, making them ven more efficient, sustainable, and cost-efficient to operate.

How about a practical example? The most efficient residential properties are planned in such a way that every wall and every room is assigned a clear role, thereby making the best possible use of the available space. Most 45-square-metre, two-room apartments with a hallway, large bathroom and balcony – if they are well planned and executed – will offer significantly higher quality of life than a run-of-the-mill 60-square-metre apartment. Do you need a narrow, long (and therefore impractical) hallway? Wouldn’t an apartment with a well-proportioned hallway, an ample sense of space, a nice bathroom, and a spacious balcony do much more to enhance residents’ quality of life?

Principle II: Regionally sourced materials

The principle of regionally sourced materials is one of the key pillars of the ESGI approach. Almost none of the materials required for efficient and sustainable construction need to travel long distances. Most are available right on our own doorstep. In our case, that means within 200 kilometres of the metropolitan region of Berlin. Being guided by the principle of regionality not only saves energy, time and money, it also enables lorry drivers in particular to spend a late afternoon together with their families. Our predecessors also subscribed to this principle thousands of years ago, and from today's perspective, they did not do so badly at all.

Principle III: Less is more – careful stewardship of resources

There are already plenty of materials manufactured using either less or green energy that are nevertheless of an equally (or even higher) value than conventionally produced materials. Making use of these materials, together with other sustainable and efficient building materials – the kind that allow for reduced material quantities and do not contain petrochemical components – is another one of the ESGI’s core principles. At every stage of the building process, we should be aiming to use materials as sparingly and wisely as possible, and striving to optimise them through improved formulations and material properties, particularly in terms of quality and quantity.

Principle IV: Low-tech, not high-tech

In almost all cases, low-tech is more sustainable than high-tech – especially in terms of indoor climate, health, and a building’s CO₂ footprint. Low-maintenance, breathable buildings without excessive, high-maintenance building services that need repairing or replacing at regular intervals are more sustainable and a better answer than applying technological solutions to overcompensate for a lack of ideas in planning and construction.

Principle V: Universality

Buildings should not be built exclusively for the here and now, nor exclusively for their current users. In other words, the most sustainable residential and commercial buildings need to be designed and built to outlast their current purposes and current users. From the outset, we need to be integrating features that guarantee the repurposability of the buildings we develop. We need sustainable, universal building structures that can easily be converted or redeveloped for future users.

It is already five past twelve! The pressure to act, to rethink and reinvent the building and real estate industries to achieve large-scale transformation, couldn’t be greater. And none of us should be under any illusions about the challenges that lie ahead. Thankfully, however, there are also solutions that, with prudent investment, can transform the planet’s building stock into efficient, sustainable, low-energy, and even passive-energy, buildings.

The thick end of the climate protection wedge is yet to come – especially for the building sector. Unlike other sectors, which have a more predictable pathway to CO₂ savings over the next few years, the building sector is heading blindly into a feedback loop, a cyclical chain reaction that will see damaging emissions multiply almost uncontrollably.

The simple reason is the impending dramatic and unavoidable expansion of construction activity. In Germany alone, the federal government has set a target of building 400,000 new apartments each year. And that doesn’t even include other types of buildings, to say nothing of other countries with even higher demand – or our planet’s steadily increasing population. According to forecasts, the building stock will at least double by 2050. Already today, we are building more than the equivalent of a new New York each year – and the trend is rising sharply.

It is more than high time for major change: We have long had the ideas, concepts and climate-friendly technologies. Now it is time, finally, to put them into practice. Thankfully, the number of like-minded people is growing every day. The transformation is already well underway!

About the Author

Torsten Nehls is Managing Director of BE Group (alternative: Belle Époque Gesellschaft für behutsame Stadterneuerung mbH).