How Can Bengaluru’s Apartments Go Green?
CSEI’s Shreya Nath was part of a panel discussion organised by the Bangalore Apartments’ Federation on how the city’s rapidly-growing residential sector could become more sustainable.
Sindhu Prasanna and Sneha Singh
Incentivising new homebuyers would be the key to ensuring that green buildings are adopted at scale. This was a recurring theme that came up during a panel discussion organised by the Bangalore Apartments’ Federation (BAF) on August 20 at the Bangalore International Centre. The Director of CSEI’s Cities and Towns Initiative, Shreya Nath, was one of the participants.
BAF, a consortium of Residents Welfare Associations (RWA) in Bengaluru that works to address common issues, organised the event to mark the end of Hasiru Habba, a contest aiming to identify and award apartments that were following the most effective sustainable practices. The panel discussion focused on how higher-income groups in gated communities can actively invest in making Bengaluru a more sustainable city to live in.
Suhail Rehman, from the Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India, (CREDAI); Ajay Raghavan, one of the co-founders of the Initiative for Climate Action; Manoj Nair, Senior Director of Enphase Energy and Vikram Rai, General Secretary of BAF were the other participants in the discussion moderated by Meera K, co-founder of Citizen Matters. This blog post sums up some of the key points that were raised during the session.
CSEI-ATREE is organising a workshop with BAF called ‘Visions for Wastewater Reuse in Bengaluru & Beyond’ on September 7, 2022.
BAF’s competition followed a rigorous process to assess their member apartments’ commitment to environmental practices. The organisers put together 50 parameters such as reuse of water from apartment sewage treatment plants, rainwater harvesting, use of plastic, use of chemical fertilisers for landscaping, use of solar power, LED lamps and more. In the first round, apartments had to answer a simple questionnaire framed around the 50 parameters. Jurors visited the sites of those that qualified to understand the onsite practices and how well these were being implemented. The award ceremony was presided over by the Principal Secretary, Chief Conservator of Forests of Karnataka, Vijay Mohan Raj.
Given that Bengaluru is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, with a burgeoning residential market that is drawing educated, young, multi-income households from across the country, it is important to look into how this sector can adopt more sustainable practices, right from construction to maintenance. This can significantly cut down carbon emissions and reduce water consumption among residents that bear a significantly larger footprint than Bengaluru’s marginalised lower-income communities, who end up bearing the brunt of extreme climate events.
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In the last 25 years, Bengaluru’s urban cover has increased 350%, while the green areas have shrunk from 17% to less than 6%. The green cover surrounding the city has diminished and given way to dense housing, said Meera K., who began the session with these alarming statistics to set the context.
Suhail Rehman and Shreya discussed the growth of high-density-high-rise cities, a phenomenon that is expected to continue as the urban population is expected to double by 2050 on finite land. Such urban forms would not only mean high levels of resource consumption, the construction of such densely-clustered high-rises would also contribute to increased greenhouse gas emissions.
‘Concrete itself accounts for 80% of embodied emissions from buildings,’ said Shreya. ‘It makes sense to look at newer and greener ways of building cities to accommodate for the growth of the city.’
From urban form, the conversation moved to incentives
Despite the pace of growth and innovation in the residential sector, awareness among potential home buyers — key to the scaling up of green infrastructure — is missing. Apartment buyers still, by and large, inherit a built system with little to no knowledge of complex systems such as rain water harvesting, water treatment, waste management, energy management etc. BAF’s Vikram Rai spoke about BAFs plan to design a handbook and a guide for home buyers and apartment managing committees to build awareness regarding the various systems and how they function. Since websites like housing.com, Commonfloor are frequently used by home buyers, these could also be forums that can be used to educate buyers about green buildings.
Read | Six reasons why Bengaluru apartments are not reusing their wastewater
But green buildings involve additional costs to put in place the right system, for instance, suitable STPs. A common theme across the panel was that incentivising new homebuyers would be the key to ensuring that green buildings were adopted at scale. Both monetary incentives such as reducing home loan interest rates or demonstrating savings in operation costs, and non monetary incentives such as improved quality of life were raised by the panelists.
Aside from ensuring that home buyers are armed with the right information, there needs to be an enabling policy environment to ensure green buildings become the norm. Short-term planning that favours older technology because the initial costs may be cheaper needs to be set aside for a more long-term vision, said Manoj Nair, who also spoke about the potential community-level benefits in terms of energy production and management. The severity of the recent floods have underlined that extreme events are likely to occur more often; green infrastructure thus not only makes sense in terms of financial savings, but also in terms of ensuring human well-being.
Edited by Kaavya Kumar
You can watch the full recording of the BAF event here.
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