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Green Recovery and Our Built Environment

3 December 2020

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What role can our built environment play in helping us get a green recovery? How can we sustainably manage our national housing stock and the retrofitting of buildings? What role can digital technology and digital twinning play in helping us sustainably manage our infrastructure and cities?

In the sixth episode of CSaP's Science and Policy Podcast, CSaP Executive Director Dr Rob Doubleday sat down with the Open University's sustainable construction expert Dr Alice Moncaster of the Open University and Director of the University of Cambridge's Centre for Smart Infrastructure Dr Jennifer Schooling to explore the role that our built environment can play in a green recovery.

You can listen to the episode here:

The built environment is a major contributor to global warming, with the 2017 UN Global Status Report suggesting that it is the biggest contributor to carbon emissions after the energy sector. 28% of our carbon emissions come from the operation of buildings, while another 11% of emissions can be attributed to building construction. Based on this, Dr Alice Moncaster of the Open University has called for us to retain as many of our present buildings as we possibly can - emphasising that we should aim for 98% of today's buildings to still be in use in 2050. But while she emphasises that we should seek to avoid demolishing buildings where possible, she believes that retaining the current building stock must be accompanied by widespread retrofitting, to bring houses up to a relatively good standard. Here, she notes that not every building needs to be brought up to passive housing airtight standards through deep retrofits, but that we instead need to do more to promote lighter retrofitting measures, which are less carbon intensive in the short-term than deep retrofits, which can still offer huge reductions in carbon emissions, and which are much more likely to be taken up by homeowners.

At the present moment, embodied carbon is not used as a decision-making tool in deciding the fate of buildings, and if we are to succeed in reducing the carbon emissions which stem from our built environment, Dr Moncaster believes this needs to change. She has argued that for us to succeed in combatting the sector's emissions, we need more publicly available data about construction materials, including a construction-sector equivalent to nutritional labelling, to provide transparency concerning how much energy has been used, and how much pollution generated, in the manufacture of building materials.

Meanwhile, from a systems perspective, Dr Jennifer Schooling has argued that we need to apply a systems-of-systems and whole-of-life perspective to managing our broader built environment, including housing, roads, infrastructure, and the connections between them. Our infrastructure is a 200-year-old set of interconnected systems of systems, which encompasses assets including railways, roads, the power network, water, and sewage systems, all of which are to some extent interlinked. Because we presently regulate these systems within silos, Dr Schooling has raised the concern that rather than optimizing the whole system of systems, decisionmakers often optimize parts of the system at the expense of the whole.

There is a good reason why we have traditionally regulated and managed these systems in silos - they are fundamentally complex systems of systems themselves, and silos has historically helped for decision-makers to gain expertise within specific areas. However, in the modern digitised world, Dr Schooling has suggested that the development of data ecosystems and digital twins has a lot to offer in ensuring we manage the overall health of our environment sustainably. By getting sophisticated about information we need from different data sources, she suggests we can think around the edges of our own system to keep it healthy, while contributing to the resilience of the whole.

To popularise the use of digital twins and this data sharing, Dr Schooling suggests that we need to overcome challenges to data sharing, a set of problems which is presently being tackled by the National Digital Twin Program. There is a willingness in industry to address these issues particularly when it comes to infrastructure, she suggests, noting that infrastructure is a public good and that we have responsibility to ensure the public is getting good value from the data assets that we are creating, as well as from the physical assets. As much of this data is generated by organizations who will not be the ones to benefit the most in the long-term, she has stressed that there is a role for government in incentivizing and regulating these processes, and in designing our financial mechanisms in guidance documents such as the Green Book to reflect long-term, rather than short-term, value.


CSaP's Science and Policy Podcast's series on Science, Policy and a Green Recovery, produced in partnership with Cambridge Zero, is available across all major podcasting platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Pocket Casts, and Castbox.