The greatest challenge of our time is climate change

e’re the first generation to see the e ects of climate change, and the last generation who can do anything about it.” (Mayor of Seattle, October 2013).

This Summer’s record obliterating temperatures in the UK have forced us to feel the impact of climate change, and to see it across Europe. The disappearing Alpine glaciers, and the rivers they feed, the devastating wildfires, and all this driven by a global average temperature rise of around 1.2° and CO2 concentrations of around 420 parts per million (up from 315 ppm in my lifetime). And the planet is now reaching potentially irreversible tipping points. So how is the built environment sector responding?

The twin horns of the dilemma on which we find ourselves are market failure and government failure.

Professor Nicholas Stern described climate change as the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.

I am a property developer, though one sometimes described as ethical (igloo is a BCorps working in the most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK’s top 20 cities). Or rather I was because I am struggling to see how to do property development in a way that doesn’t exacerbate the climate crisis.

Igloo have designed a simple approach we call Planet Positive Homes and, working with our funding partners, we are steadily reducing the climate impact of the homes we build.

Its five simple steps are; minimise UpFront Carbon, o set that ‘properly’, insulate and electrify, with green electricity, and then max out on renewable energy generation.

At igloo we are already building homes that, fingers crossed and relying on the decarbonisation of the electricity grid, will be carbon positive in use by 2035. All new homes, indeed all buildings, in the UK should be the same from 2025 when the Future Homes Standard, and the Future Buildings Standard, kicks of in England.

Not my word but that of the former Secretary of State, Michael Gove.

He spelled out his concerns “we’ve essentially got a cartel of volume housebuilders who operate in a particular way, and there are all sorts of unhappy consequences…. All of their incentives are to leave it to someone else to worry about environmental externalities of any kind, rather than to include them in the way in which they think about development.”

We also see examples of government failure – defined as costs of intervention being greater than the benefits. One example was the scrapping of the Code for Sustainable Homes in 2016 as part of the ill-fated “bonfire of red tape”. As a result we lost a decade of climate mitigation and built 2 million homes that will require retrofitting in the next decade or so.

It is often the lack of government intervention that is the failure, for example, currently, in the seeming inability to regulate UpFront Carbon.

So, if markets are trashing the planet, and governments are, at best, weak in doing anything about it, what is left?

The risk that climate change poses to the financial sector has stimulated central banks to act, and this in turn influences change across the financial sector.

In the quoted housebuilding sector it is the investors who are the biggest drivers of positive behaviour change on climate at the moment.

And this is reinforced by citizens, acting as savers, who, in a significant and rapid market shift, are increasingly demanding ‘green’ investments.

And soon the big lenders to the developers, most of whom have signed up to the Net Zero Banking Alliance, will also be having to disclose the carbon from development. This will bring focus on to UpFront Carbon even in the absence of regulation.

The big remaining challenge is eliminating the UpFront Carbon from the materials they are built with.

In igloo’s winning entry to the Government’s Home of 2030 competition, currently on site for the Sunderland Expo in 2024, we drove down the UpFront Carbon at every turn. And, while we can claim to sequester carbon in the natural materials we have specified (timber frame and panels and hemp insulation), there is still CO2 released as part of the house building process.

The big UK housebuilders, responding to investor pressure, now publish their impact on the planet. Several of them appear to have substantially exaggerated their estimates. A cynic might think that they have done this on purpose because, post 2025 when they are forced by regulation to build fossil free (in use) homes, the updated calculations will make them look like climate heroes. And that will take the pressure o the urgent need for them to radically reduce (by a minimum of 40% according to the United Nations, but logically substantially more) the UpFront Carbon emitted from the manufacture of the concrete, bricks and glass they are addicted to.

Markets are powerful things, particularly when they operate like “cartels”.

There is also a private members bill currently in Parliament which seeks Government action on UpFront Carbon so perhaps there is a mechanism for reducing Government failure.

And this is being encouraged by campaigning organisations like the Architects Journal (!), UK Green Build Council and the Architects Climate Action Network who are successfully raising the profile of this issue, and the professional institutions are currently aligning around the production of a Net Zero Buildings Standard that will address it.

Change also appears to be starting in the debate around the move from building new to retrofitting what already exists. We can see the first straws in the wind already. The uproar about the proposed demolition of M&S’s Marble Arch store and the increasing number of London o ce schemes reusing historic concrete frames and foundations for example.

There are plenty of people in the sector working hard to protect the climate, and desperate for e ective legislation. But many of those with power are still resisting change.

We will all be judged by the outcome.