Opinion Archives | UKGBC

Construction is driving global biodiversity loss – it’s time for Government to act��

Marianne Juca — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 10:20:15 +0000

With the global biodiversity negotiations in Colombia ending in failure, our Government must now use the powers it has to turn the situation around. To stand a chance of reaching the goal of protecting 30 percent of our world for nature by 2030, governments like ours will need to start tackling the vast environmental destruction driven by construction.

The good news is that much of the damage is unnecessary, and the alternatives would make our economy more efficient and offer the new Labour Government a new way to solve the affordable housing crisis.

In the debates about house building, little attention is paid to the industry’s heavy reliance on extracting materials from biodiverse regions. Globally, we extract some out of the fabric of the planet per year – equivalent to destroying two-thirds of the every 12 months. Worldwide, the built environment sector is responsible for as much as . Unsustainable mining, quarrying, and logging for timber, metals, and stone are cutting swathes through pristine rainforests, polluting watercourses, and driving untold habitat loss. All while releasing vast amounts of ‘embodied’ carbon emissions. The impact on countless communities worldwide is devastating.��

The impact on UK inflation has been damaging too. The cost of imported construction materials has soared in recent years. Yet at the same time, construction and demolition waste now makes up almost two-thirds of all UK waste.

Time is short. The Government’s targets for new homes and new infrastructure, mean the strain on nature will only escalate unless it takes urgent action to both address the amount and the way materials are extracted from other countries.

Two solutions are on offer – tried and tested by some of the most advanced parts of the industry. But they need government action to be adopted at scale.��

Firstly, prioritise renovating and re-purposing existing buildings over demolition. Our hollowed-out high streets are dotted with vacant offices and shuttered shops. Many are places that could be transformed into affordable, high-quality, healthy ‘new’ homes. The numbers are big. In 2023, over 10,000 shops closed, office vacancy rates reached 8%, and more than 250,000 houses in England remain long-term vacant.��

Adopting a re-use first approach could help alleviate the affordable housing crisis, create tens of thousands of good skilled jobs and breathe new life into communities across the country. It would also reduce the need for costly new roads, transport, electricity, water and sewage infrastructure to service urban sprawl.��

Secondly, Environment Secretary Steve Reed is right to have put a ‘zero waste economy’ at the heart of his plans for DEFRA. Pioneering parts of the industry have already worked out how to re-use steel and many other materials, putting a ‘circular economy’ approach at the centre of their thinking. But we lack a national strategy so that every company treats used materials as valuable resources on a finite planet, not as disposable waste.��

The next step is to mandate more use of recycled, reused, and low-impact materials, while also requiring sustainable sourcing to prevent the destruction of habitats and human rights around the world. Such measures would not only reduce the need for raw material extraction, but turbocharge innovation within the industry, driving more efficient technology and practices.

Both of these approaches can be fast-tracked if Labour takes a smart approach to its Planning and Regeneration Bill, expected in 2025.

In Opposition, Labour voted repeatedly to . This was championed by green groups, because it would mean every single planning decision would help with our climate mitigation and adaptation goals. And it was backed by over 100 industry firms because it would make decisions more consistent, predictable and less likely to be bogged down with challenges. But Labour was defeated. Now it’s in government, with a huge majority, it can put pen to paper to write this into law.

At the same time, it could adopt the proposals tabled by the House of Lords to extend that approach to the Environment Act. This would mean planning permission would only be granted if proposals were in line with local and national nature restoration strategies, including international commitments.

As we assess the failure of COP16 in Colombia, we should all be alarmed by experts warning that humanity is on the verge of ‘shattering Earth’s natural limits’. We have run out of time for business as usual.

Voluntary measures and market-driven approaches have shown some of what’s possible, but they are just not enough. To protect biodiversity on a meaningful scale, we need a clear national plan and regulations to drive industry action. And that requires bold government leadership.

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Climate Adaptation at COP27: How Climate Intelligence Can Unlock Private Sector Action

Daisy Everingham — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 09:04:16 +0000

Setting the scene: The climate adaptation action we needed yesterday

Extreme-weather events in 2022 have pushed climate adaptation to the top of the COP27 agenda. Each new disaster brings the consequences of increasing climate volatility into sharper focus. With the impacts of climate change mounting faster than , public and private sector investment is needed to scale up climate adaptation interventions as quickly as possible

With more attention on the ways the world must adapt to climate change, the private sector is beginning to step up to the challenge. (TCFD) have undoubtedly helped companies to identify and analyze climate risks in a more standardized way. However, the disruptions that are already occurring due to climate-related disasters are pushing companies to move beyond identification and analysis of climate risks and toward action and integration of climate risks into business strategies.

At COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, which intends to focus on the experiences of developing countries facing the most severe impacts of climate change, governments are considering ways to increase support for climate adaptation solutions. Even so, businesses can’t afford to wait for government commitments or increased regulations to begin taking action. Climate adaptation plans grounded in science and powered by technology are a priority now. Climate intelligence can facilitate and accelerate this action by ensuring that adaptation strategies are informed by comparable, shareable, actionable insights.

Corporate climate disclosures are paving the way for actionable adaptation

Thanks in large part to efforts like the TCFD, an initiative largely led by the private sector, huge progress has been made in developing the language around physical and transition climate risks and in helping businesses analyze and integrate climate risks into the fabric of their organizations.

Over the past year in particular, regulators have sought to require and standardize TCFD-like disclosures in response to investor demands for more consistent and comparable information. Beyond investors, other stakeholders also want to understand what’s really behind the corporate Net Zero commitments that have proliferated. One of the big announcements at COP26 was the , an effort to consolidate and harmonize disclosure frameworks into one global standard. Standardization is one of the key mechanisms we need to move from ambition to action.

Learn more about measuring and reporting against the TCFD framework here.

Reporting and disclosure standardization is a necessary but intermediate step. As discussed in the latest TCFD Status Report, this information needs to be more decision-useful for the financial sector and companies themselves to take action toward greater resiliency across sectors. Simply meeting reporting requirements is not enough by itself. Fortunately, these requirements have spurred the emergence of new technologies that are advancing the ways that companies analyze, report, and engage on their climate risk, and these advancements are enabling organizations to move from compliance to action to both mitigate the climate impacts on their business and to pursue new opportunities in climate adaptation innovation.

Climate intelligence is the missing piece

Until recently, understanding exactly what, where, and when climate risks exist and how to mitigate them has been a challenge for companies. Thanks to leaps in technology, machine learning and climate science, we now have this critical capability at our fingertips. At Cervest, we call this (CI), and it’s essential for any organization looking to build resilience, stay competitive, and protect their bottom line.

The physical impacts of climate change pose business risks in the forms of supply chain disruption, labor shortages, declined productivity, and higher costs of capital. We can look at the as a key example of the importance and application of CI. The pharmaceutical industry is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Disruptions in the production or distribution supply chains have enormous consequences for their businesses and the lives of those who depend on their products. In addition to the work to decrease the industry’s emissions footprint, it’s vital that pharmaceutical companies take steps to understand the physical risks facing their built assets that their businesses depend on.

With economic losses from natural disasters estimated at , businesses cannot afford to wait to implement business-critical adaptation strategies. They must act to prepare the assets they own and manage for climate impacts that will continue to intensify in the decades ahead. More and more companies are using CI to determine and prioritize adaptation decisions, and because CI is designed to be shareable, multiple teams, regions, and departments can drive coordinated adaptation programs across interdependent assets. With this shared view of climate risk, businesses and governments can coordinate their plans to adapt the critical assets that businesses and communities alike depend on, such as utilities and health infrastructure.

Enabling action beyond COP27

With governments, companies, and NGOs working to build momentum at COP27 for a bolder global adaptation agenda, the year ahead holds potential for unprecedented collaboration on adaptation enabled by CI. Climate risk disclosures have given way to significant progress within the private sector to integrate climate risk into their future strategies, and recent extreme weather events have underscored the challenges and losses of climate change in a concrete way. By putting climate intelligence at the core of climate decision-making, we can rapidly scale up effective, targeted interventions that prepare businesses and communities for a resilient, low-carbon world. Simply put, the sustainable development of economies and societies depends on climate-aligned decision-making at every turn.

This blog was written by Dr Helen Beddow, at Cervest. A UKGBC Member specialising in Climate Intelligence. Learn more about their climate intelligence product, EarthScan™.

Learn more about the built environment’s adaptation to Climate Crisis here.

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Small Developers, Net Gain and Planning with Biodiversity in Mind

Daisy Everingham — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 11:00:37 +0000

Over the next two years there will be major changes to the way the planning application process works in England. Following the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and the National Model Design Code, new changes will make the amount of biodiversity on site crucial. Measured via a wholly new metric – biodiversity will soon become a key determinant over whether or not a planning application gets approved. Developers need to prepare for these changes or face disruption.

This change is set out in the (which is currently going through Parliament and set for Royal Assent by the end of the year). In a nutshell, the new law will require developers to show how – either on their site or on an off-site location – they will increase the pre-development level of biodiversity by 10%. This is calculated via a complex new ‘Biodiversity Metric’ and the final results need to be written up in the form of a ‘Biodiversity Gain Plan’, a new set of paperwork that has to be approved by the Local Planning Authority before planning permission can be granted. The policy is explicitly intended to apply to smaller developers as well as larger ones.

As part of this policy, SME developers will have to deliver ‘Net Gain’. This policy has raised concerns that it may potentially result in a set of challenging obligations for small developers. This is either in the form of having to hire ecologists to undertake a range of new surveys or in the form of the developers themselves having to navigate the ‘Biodiversity Metric’.

To stress, ‘Net Gain’ is an excellent policy – an initiative ten years in the making. There’s no doubt that it will go a long way towards restoring England’s natural environment and to turning the planning system into an engine of biodiversity creation. It is also important to stress that DEFRA and Natural England have gone to amazing lengths to develop this policy in the midst of extraordinary events. The fact that such a sophisticated metric has been developed in the middle of Brexit and a pandemic is a testament to the determination and skill of officials.

However, the Government has recognised that ‘Net Gain’ might create problems for SME developers. Public bodies are now trying to find ways to support the sector. Their proposed solutions, however, don’t seem to go far enough – the so-called ‘small sites’ metric is definitely a step forward, but Natural England has admitted that their tools will likely still require specialist skills to use. The other proposed solution is for small developers to take a day’s training and to try and navigate the metric themselves – which is not ideal considering that Local Planning Authorities can only approve reports that meet the highest standards.

The private sector should throw itself into supporting the Government’s efforts here – we need to help SME developers comply with the metric. Failure to find such a solution risks small developers trying to complete the metric as well as trying to write up Biodiversity Gain Plans by themselves. In other words, if we get this wrong, there is likely going to be delays to the planning application process; legal difficulties as people protest the rejection of their Biodiversity Gain Plans; and a lot of questions about the viability of the ‘Net Gain’ policy (which would be a disaster for our natural environment).

There is a pressing need to make sure that SME developers can access the skills and resources that they require so that they can comply with the demands of the Environment Bill. We need to develop a system that will allow SME developers to become the driving force of biodiversity ‘Net Gain’. If we can ensure that the SME sector can easily comply with the ‘Net Gain’ policy, we will be much better placed to make this policy successful. That would be good not just for England’s environment but, considering the international players watching this ground breaking policy, potentially a massive step forward for life all over our planet.

are a Member of UKGBC and the views expressed in this Opinion piece are their own. They are a sustainability consultant with a focus on biodiversity.

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