Building Sustainable Homes

The main points are summarised below but additional detail is available via the [CARBON], [BIODIVERSITY] and [WATER] menu options above.

Greenhouse Gas Emission Driven Climate Change

The stark reality is that humans are producing far more greenhouse gas than the planet can cope with. Our national government has declared a  Climate Emergency as have many local councils and organisations.

How much do we need to cut our emissions by? The figures are simple. The latest UN Environment Programme Report (November 2019) states that :

‘The required cuts in emissions are now 2.7 per cent per year from 2020 for the 2ºC goal and 7.6 per cent per year on average for the 1.5ºC goal’

That means that to stop the earth warming by more than 1.5°C by the end of the century, we have to start cutting our emissions by 7.6% a year from 2020. Even to limit it to a 2°C rise, we have to cut them by 2.7% a year. However, since the world started focusing on climate change, there hasn’t been a single year in which the average emissions were cut.  According to the UN’s report, if the world had started making these cuts in 2010, the required reductions would have been 0.7% and 3.3% respectively.

Buildings and Carbon Emission

The greenhouse gases emitted by buildings over their entire lifecycle, beginning with construction, takes a huge toll. According to the HMG ‘Definition of Zero Carbon Homes and Non-Domestic Buildings‘ the construction and subsequent use of buildings in the UK contributes approximately 44% of the UK’s annual gas emissions.  Greenhouse gas emissions are usually measured in weight of equivalent carbon dioxide to give a standardised measure – usually labelled ‘CO2e’ but often just referred to as ‘carbon’.

In absolute terms the quantity of CO2e being emitted from this activity is still increasing, adding to the UK’s total annual emissions.  Improved construction techniques may mean that the average amount of carbon each individual new building emits is reducing but, as more buildings are constructed each year, this industry is still emitting net additional CO2e each year. 

The Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) details (the assessment of a building’s energy efficiency) show that the average new home, built in Test Valley at the moment, emits about 50-60 tonnes of CO2e in the construction phase and then a further one to two tonnes of CO2e a year through ongoing use [1]. To give an idea of the ‘offsetting’ requirements it takes approximately twenty trees 20 years to absorb one tonne of carbon dioxide.

Attaining net zero carbon living (in both construction and building use) in the near future is going to involve higher construction costs and a reliance on unfamiliar construction techniques.

Reforming the Construction Industry

The construction industry is not, by and large, delivering zero carbon emission buildings. This is not surprising; at the moment, there are  no legislative requirements and no post occupational monitoring to verify such standards. Without the legal requirement to prioritise buildings with a reduced CO2e footprint, the industry will likely continue to build the more profitable, higher CO2e emitting buildings [2].

Two ways to bring about changes are;

1. The minimum building regulation requirements are raised so that all buildings have to be constructed in a more efficient manner.
2. Carbon negative ‘Eco’ developments are given a special status by the local planning authority to encourage builders to develop housing with lower emissions than those realised by the current mandatory building regulations.

Council Local Plans needs to contain both (a) and (b) above for us to have any chance of making the changes that are needed.  The problem highlighted in the UN report above is that, like saving for a good pension, the sooner we start the better.  The sooner we start reducing our carbon output the easier it will be to avoid catastrophic climate change.  The figures in the UN report were based on the cuts starting from 2020 but the new Local Plan is not expected to take affect until 2024.  The second (b) can be started now by local councils giving planning permission to developments under the ‘exceptional’ nature provisions set out in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) paragraphs 78 and 79.  The first (a) needs to be put into Local Plans by enforcing a significant increase in building regulation standards.  This has already been done by some  councils – we need them all to do the same.

The National Planning Policy Framework and the Climate Change Act 2008

The proposal to embed true Sustainable Development into the TVBC Local Plan is totally in line with the directives within the National Planning Policy Framework – February 2019 (NPPF). The NPPF states that there should be a ‘presumption in favour of Sustainable Development’ (paragraphs 10 and 11).

The NPPF contains a definition of Sustainable Development (paragraph 7). It states: ‘At a very high level, the objective of sustainable development can be summarised as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

It is now totally clear that the current levels of carbon emission are ‘compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ and so the NPPF is a mandate for change. In fact the NPPF also specifically binds planning policy to the Climate Change Act commitments to Carbon emission reduction. In paragraph 149 it states that ‘Plans should take a proactive approach to mitigating and adapting to climate change … In line with the objectives and provisions of the Climate Change Act 2008’).

Paragraph 1 of the Climate Change Act states that ‘It is the duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that the net UK carbon account for the year 2050 is at least 80% lower than the 1990 baseline’.

Considering these direct NPPF commitments alongside the February 2020 Court of Appeal judgement, on the proposal for a third runway at Heathrow Airport, that the Government had “acted unlawfully in failing to take into account the Paris Agreement on Climate Change when deciding to designate the Airports National Policy Statement in support of the expansion of Heathrow Airport” then it is very difficult to conclude that allowing the continued construction of unsustainable, carbon polluting, homes should be considered lawful.

Biodiversity Loss

Biodiversity loss is also a key issue. When we build, our natural environment is the first to suffer. Alongside carbon controls, development that increases biodiversity must also be encouraged to avoid further species collapse. 

Here the facts are particularly shocking. The 2019 ‘State of Nature Report‘ highlighted that in the UK

‘696 terrestrial and freshwater species show a significant decline of 13% in average abundance since 1970, and it has fallen by 6% over the past 10 years’

These figures also need to be put into context and considered against ‘Shifting Baseline Syndrome’ [3]. The tendency to only compare change against an arbitrary start point that continually moves forward (what we remember from when we were young for example).  Therefore, although these figures look bad against a baseline a decade or so ago, the actual change against a baseline that existed at the beginning of the 20^th century, or even before humans in the UK started reducing their numbers, is much, much, worse.

Those animals that we have already driven to extinction don’t even enter into the State of Nature report figures. The Aurochs, Elk, Wolf, Bear, Lynx, many birds of prey and other smaller animals, birds and invertebrates that are already gone don’t get included.

A good example where we have real data is fish stocks. The fish stocks around our shores have shrunk by about 94% since 1889, the first date that the British Government started collecting fisheries data, but humans started serious fishing long before that. Even as far back as 1376 King Edward III was petitioned by subjects concerned that fish stocks were being damaged because some fisherman were using a ‘wondryechaun’.  A beam trawl pulled by a sailing boat that damaged the sea floor and indiscriminately caught immature fish.  Which they ‘fed and fat their pigs with’ to the ‘great damage of the commons of the realm and the destruction of the fisheries’ so the reality is that, as destructive fishing methods were being used over 600 years ago, fish stocks will have reduced by more than 94% when measured against a natural pre-human baseline [4]. 

Species on land will not have fared any better.  According to the ‘Red List’ report from August 2020 a quarter of the UK’s mammals are now threatened.  A glimpse or what nature used to look like is provided by a butterfly collector called S.G. Castle Russel who noted [5] in 1892 after walking in the New Forest that the insects ‘were so thick that I could hardly see ahead’ and that he had ‘captured a hundred purple hairstreak butterflies’ with two sweeps of his net.  Imagine trying to do that in the New Forest now. 

Water Consumption and Contamination

The South of England is increasingly becoming a water stressed environment due to climate change and population growth. Many parts of the UK now have less water available per head than parts of Europe usually considered much dryer (e.g. Spain). To make matters worse the UK’s water ‘footprint’ extends overseas where we effectively consume their local water to create imported goods and services.  A UK Environment Agency report pointed out that ‘The UK is the sixth largest net importer of water in the world, and only 38 per cent of total water use comes from its rivers, lakes and groundwater reserves. The average Briton uses about 3,400 litres of water per person per day in food and drink consumed and in goods and services used.’

There is therefore an increasing need to reduce the water consumption per head and to manage water resources better. Local housing developments need to employ a variety of mitigation options including the use of local rainwater harvesting, water recycling, technical methods of reducing consumption and methods of returning as much clean water as possible to the local landscape.

In addition the water discharged after human use (of all types including after sewage processing and agricultural run-off) is nutrient and chemical rich which can adversely affect the natural environment it enters. The South of England is in particular suffering from excessive nitrate levels.   A very similar situation exists in Norfolk and the river Ingol, is a chalk stream very similar to those feeding into Solent Water.  You can check out the successful mitigation measures that the Norfolk Rivers Trust has introduced here: https://norfolkriverstrust.org/ingoldisthorpe-wetland-creation-natures-own-water-treatment/, based on the use of artificially constructed wetlands, something that would also need to be implemented on the ideal development.

Footnotes

[1] The annual carbon emission of any property can be found on Page 4 of its EPC.  The carbon emitted from building the property can be estimated by taking the floor area from Page 1 of the EPC and multiplying by 700 kg (https://www.bioregional.com/resources/using-sustainable-building-materials-lessons-from-bedzed).

[2] There is a good article in the Times Newspaper called Beautiful buildings make life worth living, by Jenni Russell, 30^th Jan 2020, ‘Power lies with the big volume housebuilders, the eight companies that own the vast majority of building land, that build cheaply and profitably because they can and because shareholders demand it. Their dominance is catastrophic.’

[3] In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined this phrase. He described the syndrome: “Each generation of fisheries scientist accepts as baseline the stock situation that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species…“

[4] George Monbiot’s book ‘Feral’ contains scientifically referenced statistics and examples from recent history.  Tim Flannery’s ‘Europe – A Natural History’ documents the man made extinctions in pre-history.

[5] New Scientist, page 12, 14^th December 2019