Council on Energy, Environment and Water Integrated | International | Independent
Suggested citation: Godrej Design Lab, 2024. Building a Climate Conscious India: Scalable solutions for a low-carbon built environment.
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges for human survival. Rising heatwaves, erratic monsoons, and increased cyclonic activity are telltale signs of the impact of climate change, leading to loss of life, livelihoods, and economic activity. Countries around the world incur huge bills every year in the form of loss and damage due to climate change induced extreme weather events (EWE).
This report is an effort towards raising the collective consciousness of the building sector stakeholders and enhancing the adoption of low-carbon building solutions in their practices. Specifically, the report tries to respond to the question: which solutions are technically feasible for adoption today that can create a significant impact at scale on carbon emissions from the built environment?
Decarbonising India's building sector by 2050 is achievable through solutions categorised into four intervention scales.
Solutions that create impact when implemented across a given urban geography through innovative urban form and design.
Reducing embodied and operational carbon by adopting low-carbon materials and lean and passive design practices.
Cutting edge technology solutions can replace or enhance existing building energy systems.
Solutions that drive behavioural change in consumers by using nudges, awareness generation, and technology.
The engagement within the stakeholder ecosystem can provide the crucial impetus for making large scale adoption a reality. The urban scale solutions provide a useful backdrop to policymakers and urban planners in thinking about radical and pragmatic urban forms and designs, especially with an eye to solve low-income settlements through affordable interventions. The design and material scale offers crucial lessons for synergy between several stakeholders such as cement producers, material innovation companies as vendors, architects, construction companies and builders themselves. Likewise, the building scale offers direction to builders and construction players in how to plan and integrate design and technology driven solutions at different stages of a building life cycle. Consumer scale interventions in the form of behavioral nudges and awareness building exert a huge impact on energy consumption during the building use cycle. Through analysis of different challenges and contexts, several recommendations emerge for a varied stakeholder base for greater adoption of the proposed solutions and implementation strategies.
The main driver of climate change is anthropogenic carbon emissions. Reducing CO2 emissions or decarbonisation within a certain time frame is an existentially important task, one that all nations must undertake together. As a ray of hope, the Paris Agreement offers a global framework of cooperation to systematically decarbonise and limit Earth’s warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Whether it is devastating floods or unbearable heat, cities face some of the worst impacts of changing climate. Building resilience against these impacts is the most urgent task. However, cities are also responsible for about 70 per cent of global GHG emissions and more than half of these emissions, i.e. about 37 per cent, are linked with the built environment. Without question, sustainability and decarbonisation of built environment is a top priority. The good news is that there is wide acknowledgement and understanding of the problem. However, there is big scope to ramp-up action, which is in line with the knowledge of decarbonisation and the solutions available.
This report is an effort towards raising the collective consciousness of the building sector stakeholders and enhancing the adoption of low-carbon building solutions in their practices. Specifically, the report tries to respond to the question: which solutions are technically feasible for adoption today that can create a significant impact at scale on carbon emissions from the built environment? Through a data-driven approach, the report showcases solutions and exemplary case studies to illustrate that the work to bridge the gap between theory and action can start today. As the report reaches its intended audience, it will invigorate the conversation around decarbonising strategies and solutions, and inspire the stakeholders to act and implement.
An understanding of different kinds of carbon associated with the built environment is critical to comprehensively manage its carbon footprint. The lifecycle carbon footprint of a building has broadly two components: embodied carbon and operational carbon.
Embodied carbon(also known as hidden emissions) refers to the GHG emissions largely in the upstream activities of a building project including extraction, production, manufacturing, and transportation of materials. These materials are concrete, steel, aluminium, and other building materials such as plastics and glass. Embodied carbon represents about 11-13 per cent of total GHG emissions.
Operational carbon includes GHG emissions caused by energy use in buildings, primarily ascribed to cooling, heating, lighting equipment, lift etc. Globally, operational carbon represents about 25-27 per cent of total GHG emissions. Also, nearly 60 per cent of India’s building sector emissions are due to operational carbon.
ES2: Building materials manufacturing and operational energy use are two big sources of carbon emissions in buildings
[Source: Adapted from Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) 1 and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) 2 and IPCC report 3 ]
Activating Circular Economy for Sustainable Cooling
Activating Circular Economy for Sustainable Cooling
Activating Circular Economy for Sustainable Cooling
Activating Circular Economy for Sustainable Cooling
