The Big Debate on the National Construction Code and green rating tools on 31 March sparked animated discussion, both on and off stage. Some of it verging on fiery.
It was clear from the intensity of engagement that herein lies a rich vein of material that needed to be mined, processed and sharpened for better strategies – or to be sure we can confidently cast it aside in favour of stronger faster action.
One person we spoke to after the event said it actually doesn’t make much difference what measure you use for embodied carbon, for instance, as long as you apply a rating tool, it will work. Your embodied carbon will reduce, so too your operational carbon.
Since then, we’ve spoken to several more people, to tap expertise and balance for the propositions, comments and provocations on the night. Let’s not forget we have AI ready to scrape anything that’s published so we need to be doubly vigilant these days to make sure there’s context and balance.
A big issue that emerged on our horizon is an old one – why can’t we have mandatory minimum standards?
Why is it that other countries manage perfectly well to demand minimum standards. Australia did too when the federal government demanded any office accommodation bought or rented needed to have a minimum green building rating.
This galvanised action and changed the industry.
Green buildings were founded on a regulatory standard.
Other countries sail through their issues and impose minimum standards with little backward glance.
We also spoke to an architect in Copenhagen a week ago who’s worked in Australia for several years and told us that some housing typographies there have a maximum allowable carbon budget of 5 kilograms a square metre a year, which she confessed is effectively “nothing” in terms of carbon consumption.
She also said there’s now a “build nothing” movement in its early stages but clearly gaining ground.
But we remain stuck in voluntary land, with the industry’s commercial interests having an enormous say in what the government mandates at large for non-government action.
On rare occasions we have strong action. Victoria for instance announced the ban of gas in new homes in 2024. The Australian Capital Territory has banned gas and likewise councils such as the City of Sydney, Waverley, Parramatta, Lane Cove, Hornsby Shire, City of Newcastle, and City of Canada Bay, have chimed in while the NSW government has not.
The UK does not have carbon budgets for buildings but it does have them for building types. And thanks to UK Green Building Council’s wide coalition of stakeholders across the gamut of the built environment, there’s an ambitious trajectory recently announced for reaching climate aligned buildings by 2050 in its new “unified definition for Net Zero Carbon Aligned Buildings”.
According to an engineer familiar with the policies and practices in the UK, the targets set by the UKGBC are “quite low” for embodied and operational carbon and they align to “where you’d expect a CRREM curve to be, (CRREM is “global standard for transition risk in real estate, according to its website”.
“The UK took a stance to focus on energy use intensity – how much energy the whole building consumes”, rather than just the base building or lettable area, the source said.
Another issue that’s concerned him is the idea that because the grid is notionally decarbonising it’s fine to use more energy. But as he points out there will never be enough renewable energy at least in the foreseeable future. One reason is that all the free clean energy in the grid right now is being used by buildings, not the very needy transport or industrial sectors.
Nor does it consider the exponentially growing appetites of data centres and their spinoff giant hyperscalers.
“It’s really important we use less energy because there won’t be enough renewables.”
“It’s a weird space. We’ve got all this spare renewable energy but it’s not going into transport and manufacturing, and now there’s a glut of it and people think power is free … so don’t have to worry about sealing up their building.
“So the whole energy reduction piece is struggling but at some point in the future there won’t be enough. And that was always the key point about net zero carbon – the need to drive consumption down and decarbonisation up, significantly”.
Our source pointed out that the UK does have minimum performance standards for facades but they are still “slightly relative” and certainly not low enough in relation to net zero carbon figures.
The Europeans are closer to mandatory minimum standards but interestingly it’s the cities that seem to be more flexible and able to mandate performance than entire countries, which are often much more politically hamstrung.
That’s evidenced by local governments in NSW blocking gas from new builds, mentioned above.
And interestingly Vancouver “did something really cunning” our source said.
It gave developers a choice when it updated its building regulations: make new buildings super high performing or use a Passive House standard. PH won.
“It’s a very useable standard.” He also mentioned there’s an entire Passive House city in China. (Spoiler alert Passive House is the next topic for the Big Debate series. Save the date: 26 May, 5-8 pm).
Yet here in Australia, as some of the speakers at our debate said, we are still patting ourselves on the back for our buildings being better than the other guy’s and even claiming world leading performance.
But has Australia’s so called global leadership in green buildings been riding on misaligned tools? Maria Atkinson thinks so. As a co-founder of the GBCA along with Che Wall who was also the panel, she says yes, citing the 6 per cent weighting the GRESB standard gives to environmental outcomes as a case in point.
Wall agrees and told the audience at our debate that our rating tools are not aligned with the climate.
The thing is that most of the rating tools in Australia and relevant measures or standards are strongly controlled by the industry participants who use them.
That makes sense on many levels – the tools need to be useable, they need to factor in cost and practicality of implementations. Some of us remember that black water treatment plants were a mandatory inclusion for the highest best performing Green Star buildings back in the day … until it became clear that the bacteria that breaks down the sewage die over the weekend when there’s no one in the building to flush toilets.
Thing is, does the planet actually care about practicality of implementation or relative performance?
Let’s take a guess and say, no.
Industry sources closely connected to asset owners and their decision-making processes who we spoke to early in the development of this debate said quite frankly the adherence to relative performance is ridiculous.
Nature is not a relative thing that will look kindly and bend the rules because we’re having a bad year, they said.
We agree. Nature is fierce and brutal when not respected.
But as we mentioned earlier there are huge supporters of the green tools.
PC Thomas of Team Catalyst noted in a chat after the debate that no matter what it’s vulnerabilities it’s a fact that NABERS has consistently delivered year on year reduction in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for every building that it’s been applied to.
Which backs up the other big argument that emerged in this project – that we should stop trying to find the perfect measure for embodied carbon and other outcomes and simply do something, almost anything, and before long, there will be improvement.
Whether it’s enough, Nature will decide.