An Australian Reduction Roadmap
The Reduction Roadmap suggests need a 98% reduction in our emissions per square metre of new housing; otherwise, building our housing targets would consume almost 200% of our national emissions budget for everything, just on those new houses.
Last week we launched an Australian Reduction Roadmap, an open movement to get whole lifecycle emissions, crucially including embodied emissions limits, meaningfully represented in Australian building regulations. (‘We’, is colleagues at University of Melbourne, TERROIR, and QUT in the first instance, as described in more detail in this accompanying post, but you’re invited to sign up, support and share however you can, via the Australian Reduction Roadmap site.)
This Australian version deliberately follows the model of the Danish Reduction Roadmap. Its role is to support change in our construction codes, such that they align with climate science by working within planetary boundaries, and thus contribute meaningfully to Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement’s goals.
Rather than be a traditional interpretation of roadmap—a detailed set of strategic initiatives over time—the actual initial role of the Reduction Roadmap is to make clear the scale and speed of change required, if we are to stay within two degrees of global warming (noting that this warming, in itself, will require radical adaptation by Australia in particular), and suggest the broader conditions we need to produce that change.
The Roadmap suggests that, taking housing as an example, we need a 98% drop of emissions per square metre of new housing in Australia, within a handful of years. Indeed, if we were to build the Australian housing targets of approximately 200,000 new homes per year, in any version of business-as-usual by the industry, that new building activity would consume 200% of Australia’s total emissions budget. That’s the nation’s emissions budget for everything. So, in attempting to solve the housing crisis we would be making the climate crisis worse. (For more on this perspective, and approaches to it, read this accompanying post.)
The Reduction Roadmap method
Following Denmark’s lead, the Reduction Roadmap approach defines a national emissions budget for Australia, allocated from a global emissions budget, based on a planetary boundaries perspective and working with the principles of Paris Agreement. The Danes inferred a global emissions budget that the safe operating space implies, and stretched that over 7–12 years from 2020, suggesting a pathway for emissions reduction.
The safe operating space for greenhouse gas emissions works out at 2.51 billion tonnes of CO₂e per year, as opposed to the 53.9 billion tonnes of CO₂e that are currently emitted globally on an annual basis.
Using this required global reduction, we can describe an equivalent reduction for Australia, based on population.
It then allocates a share of this emissions budget to new housing based on the proportion that new housing currently produces. That suggests a new average emissions limit for new housing, as a form of target for both embodied and operational emissions. Comparing that with today’s current average emissions, and we can see options for stepping down over the coming years, via cascading reductions, until we bring that limit within the budget. Spoiler alert: that’s the precipitous 98% drop ultimately required.
The Roadmap indicates that more rapidly we achieve this target limit, the greater our chance of staying within two degrees of global warming. Cascading reductions allows us to see how the remaining emissions budget could be used strategically, allowing us to step down toward the target over a number of years. The fewer the years, the higher the likelihood of living well within planetary boundaries. This approach makes it possible to imagine how we might step towards that low target—6.63kg, down from 461.8kg—year by year. But it also enables us to see how sharp the drop needs to be.
Housing as the engine of change
We choose housing as ‘the case’ for the Roadmap — a focal point for the exercise — as it is the motive force behind much of the sector’s activities, and it quickly captures the social and political imagination. The way we design housing embodies who we are as a society, what we think of ourselves. It is political imperative, industrial engine, economic aspiration, and cultural expression, all at the same time. But it’s worth noting that the Roadmap’s questions, and proposed regulatory changes, would apply equally to new commercial buildings and infrastructure. In the related post, I discuss the issues with pretending that housing policy and climate policy can be kept separate.
The initial answer to this, as my colleague Mariana Mazzucato would say, is to use innovation in public policy and regulation to ‘tilt the playing field’ for everyone, equitably, towards common good outcomes for new building and retrofit housing. In this case, that means creating an emissions limit for new housing. Strictly speaking — based on the planetary boundaries thinking embedded in the legally-binding Paris Agreement, which Australia is a signatory to — that should be set at an average maximum of 6.63 kgCO₂e/(m²·a) by 2028. Currently the equivalent average is 461 kgCO₂e/(m²·a).
Those numbers are clearly confronting, but robust—and Denmark found approximately the same result, and indications from UK and Germany suggest that it’s likely a similar picture for new housing across most so-called ‘Global North’ contexts. The bottom-up calculations of Australian lifecycle emissions for housing are produced by the EPiC database team at Melbourne (Rob Crawford, James Helal and André Stephan), working within the broader Roadmap collective. EPiC is a detailed open-access database of lifecycle profiles for materials, and builds models of emissions bottom-up, for both embodied and operational emissions, taking into account likely future decarbonisation of the sector.
You can read more about the team behind this original iteration of the Australian Reduction Roadmap in this related post, as well as its forebear and inspiration, the Danish Reduction Roadmap. Over a few years, the latter has powerfully demonstrated how to build a industry-, community- and municipally-led movement that can effectively lobby for regulatory change, with the result that Danish building regulations now have emissions limits in place for new buildings. We want to see if we can do the same for Australia (and we’re happy to work with others too, sharing the approach internationally just as our Danish colleagues did with us, as described in the accompanying post).
What the Roadmap deliberately does not do is indicate how that might be done. This is on purpose. Although it would be possible to outline a series of strategies for producing meaningful change—indeed, we suggest some of these, on page 34 of the Roadmap presentation—the thinking behind the Roadmap is that we need regulatory change to ensure an equitable and legitimate framework for the public sector, private sector and community sector to innovate within. We believe that there are plenty of capable, inventive and committed actors out there. Many, if not most, of the technical solutions are in place. There is plenty of room for manoeuvre within the homogenous approach to housing policy in Australia. The role of regulation and public policy is to drive that change in a certain direction, allowing and encouraging these ideas to come forward. That creates the conditions for a far more diverse set of responses to emerge. Again, the thinking behind this approach is explored in the related post.
The Roadmap does indicate how shifting our approach to new housing—building fewer new houses (by more carefully using existing under-used housing space) or reducing the size of new housing (more in line with actual household size)—can help how we use emissions budgets. As noted in the related text, we focus on remaining budget on the actual gaps in the Australian housing sector: public housing and community-led housing. But these are simply indications of how a budget might be allocated differently, rather than fully worked-through strategies.
The Roadmap, then, must be part of broader movement to build support for meaningful regulatory and policy change, as with the Danish approach. And equally, as with the Danes, a version 2 will follow soon, featuring compelling examples and directions of buildings that demonstate how to work within these emissions limits (and please get in touch to share your ideas there). A version 3 will move beyond the simple emissions-based lens to include the linked challenges of biodiversity, water- and land-use, and other systemic factors, as with the Danish Beyond the Roadmap work. Using the same model allows us to imagine a global movement of similar approaches.
All that remains is to ask you to download and read the document and get in touch if you support the movement. Again, The Ask is written along the lines of the Danish original. By integrating climate science within the national building regulations, we recognise that:
We need to radically transform our average emissions limit for new housing. Please help us ensure that the National Construction Code’s emission limits align with climate science, working within planetary boundaries via cascading targeted reductions, thus contributing to Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement’s goals.
The document’s FAQ section makes clear that emphasis is placed on changing the regulatory context, recognising this need to ‘tilt the playing field’ for everyone, equitably, towards common good outcomes.
Do download and read the document, and get in touch with us, and others, to express your broad support, and together we aim to build a critical mass of companies, organisations and institutions who support this fundamental, yet necessary, rethink of building regulations.
For further information on the thinking and practices behind this approach, from a strategic design perspective, read this:
