Mars 2025
World Business Council for Sustainable Development (78 pages).
Climate change is no longer something in the future, to be debated whether it’s real or not. From heatwaves in India to wildfires in Los Angeles, the climate crisis is unfolding all around us. So the need to drastically cut carbon emissions is clear, and broadly speaking the Built Environment is about a third of the problem.
The question is what to do about a sector that is so diverse, and at the same time critical to who we are and what we do – our homes, schools, hospitals, factories and offices.
As Built Environment professionals we deal with this challenge every day, one building or development at a time. But it’s not enough for us to only focus on the projects that are in front
of us. We need to use our knowledge of what works on the ground, building by building, to help shape policies and market incentives that will be effective in driving down Built Environment carbon emissions across the whole sector.
In this publication we are focusing on the carbon impact of buildings in operation. This is not a new topic, the science of energy efficiency in buildings is relatively developed, and the solutions to operational decarbonization are largely already in our hands. In this sense it is different to embodied carbon in construction, which is a relatively new area of study (and is addressed in other publications in this series). The challenge therefore is one of behaviors – how we push operational decarbonization far enough up the agenda to drive real action.
Retour