To paraphrase a John Lennon festive number, so this is 2024, a year has ended and a new one has begun. Are you feeling older or maybe like my waistline you are feeling a little larger. In the aftermath of COP 28 are you also feeling a little greener?
I suspect you are probably not. While the event had some significant announcements including relatively unheralded but nonetheless important – and construction-related – agreements on the built environment, net zero emissions and resilient buildings, there remains a nagging thought that we haven’t fully addressed the elephant in the meeting room. Largely that the globe is building new infrastructure at all time pace.
As Amanda Williams, CIOB’s head of environmental sustainability notes: According to the UK Green Building Council, hard infrastructure is the second largest driver of man-made pressure on biodiversity. The climate crisis and the nature crisis are deeply interconnected, and if we don’t seek to solve them together, we risk solving neither.
She argues that the built environment industry must carefully consider its role in protecting and restoring nature.
But without government incentives or international agreements to sweeten the deal for developers and contractors, let alone sub-contractors, it is hard to see where the real impetus or financial structures are going to be in place to ensure that the people that buy and use equipment – and have the know how to use the machinery most efficiently – are placed.
Obviously, the issue of climate change is a moral and ethical challenge as well as being a political and technological bar,rier to negotiate. But realistically, if you spend your children’s inheritance on going green, then you will – in many construction markets where sustainability is not properly funded – be not be going at all for very long.
Then there is the issue of availability of the equipment in the first place. Saudi Arabia has made a lot of noise about improving its green credentials, but insisting on greener equipment and vehicles has forced some construction to stop or, worse, abandon the green ambitions of some major projects.
Clearly some new thinking is required if contracting and sub-contracting is to help lower emissions on projects.
Fortunately, we are at least seeing new greener products and power filter into the market. At COP 28, FAMCO demonstrated Volvo’s electric excavator and there are a raft of new off-the-grid power solutions emerging.
The technology is here, the willingness is there, but can we now have some funding to go with it all please.
That may be the most important New Year’s resolution of all.
