A Carbon Primer for the Built Environment

Simon Foxell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317933946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In a world increasingly concerned about the impact of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere on global climate, the A Carbon Primer for the Built Environment will provide an understanding of the science and the public policy and regulation intended to tackle climate change. It will spell out the essential information needed for navigating through the growing regulatory maze with confidence.

The book will:

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• Provide an explanation of climate change, why carbon has been targeted as the main culprit and how this will impact the working lives of architects

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• Explain key concepts such as: carbon footprinting, contraction & convergence, concentration based targets, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, decarbonising supply and reducing energy demand as well as the relevance of relevant government targets and international agreements

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• Suggest an overall framework for achieving the carbon reduction targets and the requirements that will place on building designers

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• Outline requirements and common standards and codes – providing guidance on compliance mechanisms

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• Suggest and examine likely models for future practice

The book will be essential reading for anyone wanting to familiarise themselves with the new landscape of carbon reduction in the built environment, with a particular focus on building design. It will also provide an accessible reference volume for information on particular policies, terms and initiatives as well as key data and numbers that will assist initial carbon calculations.

Chapter 1

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Background

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Almost all international bodies, governments, public agencies, companies and expert bodies now approach climate change seriously, despite the background clamour from sceptics and others who view it as an obstacle to their immediate business objectives or lifestyle choice. They understand that business as usual is no longer possible in planning for the years and decades ahead; the increasingly challenging issue is how to prepare for the future.

As Margaret Thatcher said, in a speech to the United Nations in 1989, in the still early days of general climate change awareness: ‘The evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the International Community, do about it?’¹

The urgency of dealing with climate change is now increasingly evident from the opening phrases of any relevant policy document:

The Parties included in Annex I shall strive to implement policies and measures under this Article in such a way as to minimize adverse effects, including the adverse effects of climate change, effects on international trade, and social, environmental and economic impacts on other Parties, especially developing country Parties.

(Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change, 1998)

Climate change is one of the most serious threats facing the world’s environment, economy and society. But if we all act, the world can avoid its worst effects. The devastating floods, droughts and storms we have seen in the UK and across the world in recent years show all too clearly how vulnerable we are to climate extremes and how devastating they can be. And we have been warned that things will get worse. We have to take practical action to deal with flooding and severe weather. But we also need to tackle climate change by cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

(Climate Change: the UK Programme, Department of
Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2000)

The UK Government believes that climate change is one of the gravest threats we face, and that urgent action at home and abroad is required.

(National Renewable Energy Strategy for the United
Kingdom, Department for Energy and Climate
Change, 2011)

As a result, we are awash with initiatives to deal with and cope with the issue at international, European, national and local levels. There is a sense of a gathering storm, but so far it has had relatively little impact on lifestyles or practices in the developed world, although the same cannot be said of the many poorer areas of the world affected by droughts or rising sea levels. The inhabitants of such places have had relatively little to do with the causes of the problems facing them and are generally powerless to make any changes to their way of life that will make a difference to the solution.

This book focuses on the nature of the problem, the responses at different levels and some of the potential solutions. The responses described are mainly at a European or UK level and sometimes relate only to England. This is not to ignore the global nature of the issue, but to recognise that most of the solutions are close to home, and, if we are going to tackle anything on the wider scale, we must first clean up our own act.

The following chapters will deal with the reasons behind the threat of climate change and the possible actions to be taken in greater depth, and it is possible to skip directly to them if you wish. What follows here is a brief overview, in very approximate terms, of current issues and responses.

Principles of climate change

The temperature of a body floating in a perfect vacuum, such as the Earth, relates directly to the amount of energy it absorbs. As its heat loss rises with its temperature, it will reach a stable temperature when it warms to the point when it is radiating energy at exactly the same rate as it receives it.

The only external source of energy that the Earth has is the sun, radiating energy at us at a reasonably constant rate, with only minor fluctuations on an 11-year periodic cycle. However, only about half the sun’s energy is absorbed, and the other half is reflected back into space and lost again. The heat loss from the Earth itself is in addition to this reflected loss and, importantly, it is relative only to its temperature at its outer face, effectively that of the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

That the atmosphere gets colder as the distance from the surface of the planet increases now feels part of the natural order of things. However, it is neither intuitive (just ask Icarus) nor fully true – at a certain point, the tropopause, it starts to get warmer again, before eventually reverting to a downward gradient towards the effectively bitter cold of outer space. Vitally, for the warmth of the planet, the tropopause prevents the convective heat of rising warm air simply dissipating into space, and the only-partial transparency of the atmosphere prevents it all being lost by radiation.

Looking at the sky on a clear night, with a crystal-clear view of stars billions of light years away, the atmosphere appears transparent enough; but this is only true for parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. In other parts of the spectrum, including the infrared section, the atmosphere is semi-opaque, and it is because the atmosphere is transparent to radiation from very hot bodies such as the sun and stars, and not to that from warm bodies such as the surface of the Earth and ourselves, that the planet has reached an equilibrium at a habitable, Goldilocks level – not too hot and not too cold. This is what is known as the greenhouse effect, the continued working of which is essential for our planetary comfort and survival.

The constituent parts of the atmosphere that absorb the infrared radiation and reduce its transparency are the larger and heavier molecules in the air, collectively known as the greenhouse gases (GHGs). They include water vapour (clouds) and particles of carbon (smoke and soot), but the most prevalent and long lasting of these GHGs is carbon dioxide (CO₂). CO₂ is the gas that we, and our cars, breathe out as we convert fuel into exhaust fumes, and that plants reabsorb as they use the energy of sunlight to convert it back into carbonbased molecules. In simplistic terms, the more CO₂ (together with the other GHGs) there is in the atmosphere, the more re-radiated heat is absorbed, and the higher the temperature of the Earth at equilibrium becomes.

Since the industrial revolution, mankind has been extracting greater and greater amounts of carbon-based fuel from the Earth and burning it to create energy. The CO₂ produced as a side-product has been finding its way into the atmosphere, and, as a result, the planet has begun to warm. It is now averaging approximately 0.6°C above pre-industrial (before 1750) temperatures, and current predictions for the increase in temperature at the end of the century range from 2.0°C to 6.4°C.² Sszuch temperature changes would be disastrous for the ecology and liveability of the planet, and this is why scientists, politicians and campaigning groups are so concerned. (See Chapter 2 for greater detail.)

Recordings and commitments

Concern first surfaced in the scientific community in the 1960s, as it saw evidence of both CO₂ levels and temperatures rising when compared with the historic record being extrapolated from evidence in tree rings, ice cores and geological samples. The basic science of global temperatures had long been understood, following the work of Fourier and Arrhenius in the nineteenth century, and the rising temperature of the Earth had first been noted by Guy Callendar in the 1930s, but other parts of the jigsaw were only assembled when CO₂ measurements from high-altitude observatories, such as Mauna Loa in Hawaii, replaced the more traditional monitoring at sea level. Charles Keeling started measuring the CO₂ at Mauna Loa for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1958 and each year saw a steady average rise in its concentration in the atmosphere; a rise that continues to this day (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Atmospheric CO₂ recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii from 1958 to 2013

Source: Data/image provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Monitoring Division, Boulder, CO, USA, http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/.

The issue attracted political attention in 1988, at just the point when international politicians were flushed with the success of the Montreal Protocol in banning gases identified as creating a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, and through the UN they rapidly put in place a series of bodies charged with assessing and controlling climate change, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. An international protocol to tackle the issue of climate change and with specific and binding CO₂ reduction targets was agreed in Kyoto in 1997, albeit a protocol that the United States never signed, and that Russia only ratified in 2003, Australia in 2007 and Turkey and Zimbabwe in 2009. A grand and internationally binding agreement was planned for the UNFCCC meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009, but it was a meeting that failed to agree anything of significance, leaving the world with a mixed set of targets and agreements and no clear way forward on overall reductions in GHG emissions.

Regionally, from Kyoto on, and even in the United States, emission reductions were tackled through local regulations and target setting, in part to meet national obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, and in part because of a genuine recognition of the problem and a determination to get ahead of the carbon reduction game. No country or regional grouping wanted to be burdened with heavy carbon polluting industry and power generation if they could help it, although some countries, such as China, saw no other way of achieving the growth that they desired even more. The European Union has set stringent carbon targets on its member states, as have individual countries within the EU.

The UK’s requirement for an 80% cut in CO₂ emissions from 1990 levels, by 2050, as required by the Climate Change Act of 2008, is possibly the toughest of these commitments and is supported by a series of carbon budgets leading to 2050 that need to be met in turn. What is less clear is that the UK has put into place the mechanisms for adequately tackling the country’s emissions and its physical and psychological reliance on burning fossil fuels to maintain its industry and the country’s living standards.

Figure 1.2 Global land-ocean temperature index

Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. An updated version of the graph in James Hansen et al.’s paper, ‘Global temperature cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1 Background
• 2 Climate and carbon
• 3 Carbon sources and sinks
• 4 Carbon emissions
• 5 Policy response
• 6 Regulations and compliance
• 7 Strategies and solutions 1: Reducing demand
• 8 Strategies and solutions 2: Improving efficiency
• 9 Strategies and solutions 3: Decarbonising supply
• 10 Looking forward
• 11 Making it happen
• 12 Adaptation
• 13 Practice
• 14 Facts and figures
• Glossary, including metrics and measurements
• Bibliography, including websites
• Index