Time for universities to be ‘heroic’ on sustainability

Time for universities to be ‘heroic’ on sustainability

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Time for universities to be ‘heroic’ on sustainability, says Crow

Academy ‘at the heart’ of humanity’s failures to get to grips with scale of the issue, warns president of Arizona State University
Time for universities to be ‘heroic’ on sustainability
Source: Stock

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Universities must take “heroic action” to address the sustainability crisis after helping to lay its foundations by failing to take action sooner, Arizona State University president Michael Crow has claimed.

Speaking at Times Higher Education’s Global Sustainable Development Congress (GSDC), Professor Crow said universities had moved too slowly to address the problem.

He said the sustainability emergency – which the GSDC is meeting to discuss urgent solutions for – was caused by the relationship between the built environment and the natural systems on which we are dependent.

Professor Crow told delegates at the event in Saudi Arabia that sustainability was “critical to our success as a species”.

“We in academia have contributed mightily to the designed environment, and hold much of the responsibility for the lack of sustainability of that built environment and its increasing disruption of the natural environment,” he said.

Professor Crow warned that the world was entering an “unbelievably challenging moment where everything is accelerating”, and that there were many things higher education could have done already but had not.

The sector’s inability to be “more conscious of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it” helped lay the foundations for the sustainability crisis today, he said.

“A lot of groups have been responsible for our lack of sustainability, but at the heart of all of them has been the academy, [and] the universities,” he added.

“It’s time for universities to really step up for heroic action in the way that universities did around some other issues in the past.

“It’s time for new types of knowledge to be produced, new ways of thinking.”

Addressing the congress at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) via video link, Professor Crow said trying to build alliances between universities was “nearly impossible”.

He called for universities to broaden the way they organised themselves because working in isolation would “not get us there quickly enough”.

The summit, held in the Middle East for the first time, is aiming to challenge the usual thinking on what higher education, with the support of governments, businesses and society, must do to help society meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“It’s time for us to mount up, to begin working together, to begin aligning together, to begin working across institutions and across the world to take on this notion of global sustainable development,” added Professor Crow.

Also speaking at the summit, Tony Chan, president of KAUST, said the world was in a state of crisis that imperiled all of humanity, and universities across the globe should act with resolve.

“Our required response to the present crisis must be of a scale and sense of urgency akin to how we must respond to major world wars,” he said.

“Our universities must cease to be exemplars of unsustainable practices and we must become the transformative enablers of sustainability for others.”

Those outside higher education took their cue not just from what universities preached, but from what they practised, said Dr Chan.

“If academics are serious about tackling sustainability challenges, we can’t wait for the cavalry to show up,” he said. “We are the cavalry.”

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.Read more on Times Higher Education

How Do International Codes Assure Sustainability?

How Do International Codes Assure Sustainability?

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We Expect A Lot From Our Buildings — How Do International Codes Assure Sustainability?

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Today, society faces 3 major challenges in the built environment: ensuring building safety, improving sustainability, and addressing our affordable housing crisis.

May is Building Safety Month. Up-to-date international codes can make communities more equipped to endure increasingly frequent and severe weather events, improve sustainability, and address the affordable housing crisis. This year, innovation and collaboration are evolving due to the increasing frequency and severity of global weather events. All communities need building codes to protect their citizens from disasters like fires, weather-related events, and structural collapse.

It seemed to make sense to learn more about how modern and innovative international building codes address these imperatives, how code officials work day in and day out to keep the public safe, and how the International Code Council is enabling the flow of innovative policies and practices around the world to improve the built environment.

So we reached out to Dominic Sims, CEO of the International Code Council, who agreed to an interview.

Q: Thanks for making yourself available to answer some questions. For those unfamiliar with the International Code Council, why is it in existence, and what effect has it had on cities and towns across the globe?

Dominic Sims, CEO of the International Code Council, Photo provided by International Code Council

The International Code Council was established in 1994 as a non-profit organization dedicated to developing a single set of comprehensive and coordinated model building codes. The mission of the Code Council is to steward the development process for model codes that benefit public safety and support the industry’s need for one set of codes without regional limitations. We are a member-focused association with members from across building industries who come together to participate in our democratic and transparent process to develop the most widely used set of building safety codes and standards in the world – the International Codes® (I-Codes®).

Our technical staff works closely with legislators and code officials to help jurisdictions implement the most appropriate set of codes for their specific regions.

 

 

Q: I’m struck by the call for reciprocity toward improving sustainability and addressing the affordable housing crisis. These 2 objectives seem not to be related. Might you offer some insights into their symbiosis?

We expect a lot of our buildings. They are complex systems that have broad ranging impacts on our lives and communities. They protect us from hazards, influence our health, and impact our environment. Finding the balance across all these expectations while maintaining affordability is challenging, but the Code Council and governments must navigate these complexities.

Housing affordability is particularly important for low and moderate income households. These households are often the hardest hit by disasters — many of which are exacerbated by climate change — and lack the resources for post-disaster recovery. At the same time, they spend a disproportionate amount of their income on utility bills — in some places 3 times as much as the average household. When we talk about housing affordability, it’s not just whether we can get someone in a house but whether they can afford to stay there.

The International Code Council is currently the only code development organization that actively considers cost as an element of the code development process. Through the code development, process stakeholders from across the building industry come together to identify the best practices for safety and sustainability while ensuring the resulting buildings remain affordable and accessible to broad populations. Naturally, individual communities have their own perspectives on priorities for their building stock. The Code Council provides communities with tools to achieve those priorities from model codes that capture the current consensus to stretch codes that can assist communities in going beyond minimum-level requirements.

Q: May is Building Safety Month. What should our readers know about the need to adopt modern, regularly-updated building codes?

Today, society faces 3 major challenges in the built environment: ensuring building safety, improving sustainability, and addressing our affordable housing crisis. Modern and innovative international codes are society’s first line of defense to address these imperatives. One of the most cost-effective ways to safeguard communities against natural disasters is to build using hazard-resistant building codes.

FEMA studies show that every dollar invested in the adoption of modern building codes provides 11 times more in savings by reducing casualties, lowering the cost of building damage and helping communities get back on their feet faster by minimizing indirect costs such as business interruptions and lost income. We want to emphasize to all communities the importance of adopting modern building codes and stress the critical importance of continued inspection and enforcement to keep buildings and their occupants safe and healthy. We also encourage local governments to fund their building departments to support the needed level of maintenance inspections.

 

 

The formula for success in implementing and supporting modern building codes and inspections is simple: staff, train, and finance.

Q: How is the building industry working to increase water efficiency through innovative practices and technologies — not just domestically but worldwide?

Logo provided by ICC

Innovation and collaboration must evolve due to global weather events’ increasing frequency and severity. There are many examples of countries in water-scarce areas that are innovating to increase water efficiency. Those involved in the code development process can draw best practices from the following examples across the globe:

  • Israel is leading the world through its policies, practices, and technologies for its water resources and conservation, most notably through reclaiming over 80% of its wastewater and stormwater for agricultural operation.
  • Saudi Arabia boasts the highest production of desalinated water worldwide (the country removes salt out of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf) and is in the process of converting its desalination plants to solar.
  • Cape Town, South Africa is incorporating automated domestic water metering installations to set a target water usage for each resident per day, leveraging alternative water sources, and updating their supply network infrastructure.
  •  The United Kingdom is cutting water use through water metering, incentives for water-saving technologies, hosepipe bans, and investing in updating the country’s water supply equipment.
  • The North China Plain has addressed increasing agricultural demands on water through increased monitoring, institutionalized water conservation practices, ground leveling, and more efficient drainage and irrigation sprinklers.

Q: How does Building Safety Month address some of the issues that we face as a global community, including extreme weather events and water scarcity?

Clean water is the world’s most precious commodity, and public health depends on safe and readily available water. The World Health Organization estimates over two billion people live in water-stressed countries, which is expected to worsen in some regions due to a changing climate and population growth. Water conservation and efficiency issues have become crucial conversations amongst building safety professionals in recent years. Building Safety Month raises awareness about these issues by reinforcing the need to adopt modern, regularly-updated building codes, and helps individuals, families, and businesses understand what it takes to create safe and sustainable structures.

 

 

Q: What additional details or insights might you provide on how we can institute these best practices in the US?

There is currently no national standard on maintenance and inspection. Individual states follow their own enforcement procedures to seek out, modify, adopt and enforce their own building codes and standards. Currently adopted codes, which local jurisdictions can, and do, modify on a case-by-case basis, may or may not include provisions for building re-inspections and maintenance requirements. The International Property Maintenance Code® (IPMC®) established minimum requirements for the maintenance of existing buildings through model code regulations that contain clear and specific maintenance and property improvement provisions. The latest edition is fully compatible with the International Building Code® (IBC®).

Every jurisdiction needs to understand what their specific regional needs are so that their building, maintenance, and re-inspections codes have appropriately specific provisions for the natural, environmental, and emergency conditions more prevalent in their area (e.g., Florida hurricanes, Kansas tornadoes, California earthquakes and wildfires).

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.Read more on CleanTechnica

 


Greenhouse gas emissions tracking project

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Creating a Culture of Sustainability in Homebuilding

Creating a Culture of Sustainability in Homebuilding

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Yale School of Management published this insight on Creating a Culture of Sustainability in Homebuilding that could be said to be not beyond their acclaimed mission of educating leaders for business & society.  It is as wise as useful in these days of uncertainty.  Here it is.
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Creating a Culture of Sustainability in Homebuilding

Sustainably built homes cost more up front, but that investment can easily pay off over the decades with savings on heating and cooling—not to mention resiliency and improved indoor air quality. Aaron Smith ’16 is helping builders and buyers understand the benefits of building homes that can generate as much energy as they use.

Aaron Smith

CEO, Energy & Environmental Building Alliance (EEBA); CEO, GreenSmith Builders
We’re trying to transform an industry that has been doing things pretty much the same way for more than 100 years. We want to make healthier, electric, resilient, decarbonized, and net-zero homes the norm.

Q: What is the Energy and Environmental Building Alliance?

The Energy and Environmental Building Alliance (EEBA) is a community of 72,000 builders, architects, and other stakeholders across North America coming together to learn, share, and collaborate on how to build homes in a more sustainable manner.

Ultimately, we’re trying to transform an industry that has been doing things pretty much the same way for more than 100 years. We want to make healthier, electric, resilient, decarbonized, and net-zero homes the norm.

Q: Why is that important?

Forty percent of our energy use comes from buildings. That’s a significant contributor to climate change. Overall, the construction industry is very slow to adopt advances; even for great products and effective new approaches, it can take 20 years. But the technology’s there to do better, so if you want to innovate and disrupt, housing is a really interesting space right now.

The move to sustainable methods is a patchwork, but it’s ready to spread. We’re seeing the start of hockey stick growth. EEBA tracks single family homes and multi-family units built at or above a Zero Energy Ready standard across North America. Over the past two years there was a 440% increase.

Q: What do you mean by Zero Energy Ready and above?

The Zero Energy Ready Home is a standard set by the Department of Energy. To qualify a building must be energy efficient enough that a renewable energy system could offset the home’s annual energy use, so it’s extremely well insulated and extremely airtight, and may have an energy recovery ventilator. Above that is net zero, where a solar, wind, or renewable other system is producing all the energy the house needs. And the step beyond that is net positive, which is a building that actually exports energy into the grid.

There are a lot of standards and certification programs out there—LEED, National Green Building Standard, Passive House, Healthy Building, the Living Building Challenge. We tend to educate builders about all of them and allow them to choose the one that’s best for them and their clients.

Something that doesn’t have a certification program but we’re always focused on is building resiliency. How does it protect the occupants and continue to operate during a stressful period? With extreme weather events and potentially extended power outages that’s increasingly important.

The efficacy of solar panels has gone up so much that even a small amount of solar allows an efficient house to be net zero. Pairing that with new inverter technology, which lets your house feed excess solar power into the grid most of the time but switch to running the house directly off solar when the there’s a grid outage, adds resilience.

We’re seeing more and more battery deployment for backup within homes. Those can be dedicated systems or with something like the F-150 Lightning, Ford’s electric pickup, your EV can serve as backup power for the home during an outage.

Q: Is the interest in more sustainable building coming from builders, consumers, or somewhere else?

There are many drivers. In a few places, building codes are requiring new construction to be all electric. For those places, understanding how to build this way is really a license to operate. But for the most part, our members are professionals who want to be the best in their field. They have a sustainability mindset and a calling to build high-performance homes.

I learned about craftsmanship from my grandfather. He was proud of building homes that would last for 100 years. To me, sustainability is an extension of craftsmanship. It just makes sense. I hope my generation decides the building it’s putting up for the next 100 years will be sustainable. Building in the most sustainable way goes to a larger mission of being stewards of this planet for our kids and grandkids. I get excited by that.

And as millennials start to become the generation driving housing, their predisposition toward more sustainable and healthier is pushing awareness of building more sustainably into the industry.

When people consider buying a house, they look at the listing price. It’s not easy to look at the operating costs or the health costs, which can be dramatically different from one house to another.

In some cases, sustainability isn’t at the forefront. A builder in Texas who does net zero homes told me 15% of his customers do it for environmental reasons. Another 25% want the self-sufficiency of being able to go off the grid with their own water supply, solar power, and backup batteries. The remaining 60% do it for economic reasons. Between the rebates and incentives that are available and the certainty of owning their power supply so there won’t be escalating costs, they are ready to make the investment.

Q: Is it more expensive to build in a sustainable way?

It typically does cost from 1% to 11% more to build a very sustainable home. But it’s a lot like electric vehicles. The upfront cost is higher, but it you look at the total cost over time, it more than pays off the investment.

The problem is, when people consider buying a house, they look at the listing price. They don’t think to—and it’s not easy to—look at the operating costs or the health costs, which can be dramatically different from one house to another.

I didn’t ask about heating costs when I rented a wonderful 1740s farmhouse in Connecticut while I attended Yale SOM. It cost $1,000 a month to heat during the winter. Operating costs make a real difference.

In addition to running EEBA, I also co-founded GreenSmith Builders with Marc Wigder a classmate from Yale SOM. We build what we call attainable sustainable housing—energy-efficient single- and multi-family homes. I just got the monthly heating bill for a 27,000 square foot apartment building. It was $720 for the whole building in Minnesota in the winter.

Sustainable building makes housing more affordable when you look at total cost of ownership. When you think about living in a house for years, even decades, would you spend 1%, 5%, 11% more up front if you know you’ll get it back with savings on lower operating costs? Sustainable builders are starting to energy model each home so they can quantify the value long term.

And that’s only considering the energy costs. Health costs are harder to quantify, but in many homes, indoor air quality is worse than outdoor air quality. There are a lot of great systems that ensure a really healthful environment in the home.

Q: Why isn’t this approach the norm?

Market sector change is very difficult. It takes bringing stakeholders together. It takes sharing of ideas and best practices. It takes radical collaboration across organizations. We get up every day at EEBA and try to transform the industry. It’s extremely challenging and frustrating and exciting and rewarding, all at the same time.

Change is hard in any industry. For residential construction, there are a lot of incumbency issues. There’s huge demand for housing. You can sell every house that you build. Why would you change anything? That’s especially true in places where building codes haven’t been updated in years. It’s common to think that a house built to code means it’s all good. Another way to look at a house built to code is that it’s the worst house that’s not illegal. Depending on where you are, simply building to code isn’t desirable.

Switching costs are real, especially in an industry where it’s common to learn through apprenticeship on a job site—“This is how we do it.” At EEBA we try to make that mentoring culture a strength. Because builders work locally, for the most part they’re not in the same market as other EEBA members; they’re not competing against each other, so they can share and learn from each other and continually raise the level of knowledge of what it means to be a sustainable home builder. That’s a powerful part of EEBA.

What we’re trying to do is really speed the adoption of great technology, great building practices, and sustainable thinking across the industry. We’re making continuous learning easier. We provide online and in-person education. We do a yearly summit where we bring builders together.

Given the trends, if builders don’t have a plan to be building Zero Energy Ready houses, they may not be able to operate in the marketplace within a few years. I think it’s going to shift that quickly.

Q: Are there enough people going into the building trades to supply the required labor?

There are not enough people going into the trades. That’s starting to force change in interesting ways. Because builders can’t hire all the labor they’d like, offsite construction techniques are getting attention.

There are a variety of different approaches, but essentially components of the house are built in a factory. Then the floor cassettes or structured insulated panels that make up the walls are trucked to the building site and craned into place. It’s incredible how fast the modules go together.

There are a lot of investments in offsite construction. Builders are looking at it. Lumber yards and other suppliers are interested. We’re seeing a huge shift right now. It really helps with the labor issues. And it can be done to the highest sustainability standards.

Q: What led you to Yale SOM?

When I was an undergraduate there weren’t courses in sustainability, let alone a major. I learned about sustainability on the job as best I could. I went to Yale SOM to strengthen my understanding of sustainability and to learn how to have impact at scale.

When I came across EEBA, an incredible mission-driven organization that’s really changing the face of construction across North America, it just brought together everything that I had learned across my career. Now the goal is to grow the organization significantly and grow our impact significantly so we can speed up that change in the marketplace.

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Read original text on Yale Insights.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would save billions

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would save billions

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Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would save billions from the dangerously hot climate, but not only that.  It could bring improvements to life with cleaner air and improved water and soil quality.  

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The image above is on the many effects of dangerously high temperatures, including reduced crop yield. Credit Pablo Tosco / Oxfam International

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would save billions from dangerously hot climate

 

Current climate policies will leave more than a fifth of humanity exposed to dangerously hot temperatures by 2100, new research suggests.

Despite the Paris Agreement pledge to keep global warming well below 2°C (compared to pre-industrial levels), current policies are projected to result in 2.7°C warming by the end of the century.

The new study, led by researchers at the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, associated with the Earth Commission, and Nanjing University, assessed what this would mean for the number of people living outside the “climate niche” in which our species has thrived.

It says about 60 million people are already exposed to dangerous heat (average temperature of 29°C or higher).

And two billion – 22% of the projected end-of-century population – would be exposed to this at 2.7°C of global warming.

The paper highlights the “huge potential” for decisive climate policy to limit the human costs and inequities of climate change.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C would leave 5% exposed – saving a sixth of humanity from dangerous heat compared to 2.7°C of warming.

The study also finds that the lifetime emissions of 3.5 average global citizens today – or just 1.2 US citizens – expose one future person to dangerous heat. This highlights the inequity of climate crisis, as these future heat-exposed people will live in places where emissions today are around half of the global average.

In “worst-case scenarios” of 3.6°C or even 4.4°C global warming, half of the world’s population could be left outside the climate niche, posing what the researchers call an “existential risk”.

“The costs of global warming are often expressed in financial terms, but our study highlights the phenomenal human cost of failing to tackle the climate emergency,” said Professor Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter.

“For every 0.1°C of warming above present levels, about 140 million more people will be exposed to dangerous heat.

“This reveals both the scale of the problem and the importance of decisive action to reduce carbon emissions.

“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2.7°C would mean five times fewer people in 2100 being exposed to dangerous heat.”

Defining the niche

Human population density has historically peaked in places with an average temperature of about 13°C, with a secondary peak at about 27°C (monsoon climates, especially in South Asia).

Density of crops and livestock follow similar patterns, and wealth (measured by GDP) peaks at about 13°C.

Mortality increases at both higher and lower temperatures, supporting the idea of a human “niche”.

Although less than 1% of humanity currently live in places of dangerous heat exposure, the study shows climate change has already put 9% of the global population (more than 600 million people) outside the niche.

“Most of these people lived near the cooler 13°C peak of the niche and are now in the ‘middle ground’ between the two peaks. While not dangerously hot, these conditions tend to be much drier and have not historically supported dense human populations,” said Professor Chi Xu, of Nanjing University.

“Meanwhile, the vast majority of people set to be left outside the niche due to future warming will be exposed to dangerous heat.

“Such high temperatures have been linked to issues including increased mortality, decreased labour productivity, decreased cognitive performance, impaired learning, adverse pregnancy outcomes, decreased crop yield, increased conflict and infectious disease spread.”

While some cooler places may become more habitable due to climate change, population growth is projected to be highest in places at risk of dangerous heat, especially India and Nigeria.

The study also found:

  • Exposure to dangerous heat starts to increase dramatically at 1.2°C (just above current global warming) and increases by about 140 million for every 0.1°C of further warming.
  • Assuming a future population of 9.5 billion people, India would have the greatest population exposed at 2.7°C global warming – more than 600 million. At 1.5°C, this figure would be far lower, at about 90 million.
  • Nigeria would have the second-largest heat-exposed population at 2.7°C global warming, more than 300 million. At 1.5°C warming this would be less than 40 million.
  • India and Nigeria already show “hotspots” of dangerous temperatures.
  • At 2.7°C, almost 100% of some countries including Burkina Faso and Mali will be dangerously hot for humans. Brazil would have the largest land area exposed to dangerous heat, despite almost no area being exposed at 1.5 °C. Australia and India would also experience massive increases in area exposed.

The research team – which included the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and the Universities of Washington, North Carolina State, Aarhus and Wageningen – stress that the worst of these impacts can be avoided by rapid action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Speaking about the conception of their idea, Professor Marten Scheffer, of Wageningen University, said: “We were triggered by the fact that the economic costs of carbon emissions hardly reflect the impact on human wellbeing.

“Our calculations now help bridging this gap and should stimulate asking new, unorthodox questions about justice.”

Ashish Ghadiali, of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, said: “These new findings from the leading edge of Earth systems science underline the profoundly racialised nature of projected climate impacts and should inspire a policy sea-change in thinking around the urgency of decarbonisation efforts as well as in the value of massively up-shifting global investment into the frontlines of climate vulnerability.”

The research was funded by the Open Society Foundations and the paper is also an output of the Earth Commission – convened by Future Earth, the Earth Commission is the scientific cornerstone of the Global Commons Alliance.

Wendy Broadgate, Executive Director of the Earth Commission at Future Earth, said: “We are already seeing effects of dangerous heat levels on people in different parts of the world today. This will only accelerate unless we take immediate and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Work on climate solutions by the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter has identified “positive tipping points” to accelerate action, including a recent report that highlighted three “super-leverage points” that could trigger a cascade of decarbonisation.

The paper, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, is entitled: “Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming.”

Read more on University of Exeter