Behind the Australian Reduction Roadmap—and beyond The Number
If we build our housing targets, we will use almost 200% of our national emissions budget for everything on those new houses. Here’s how, why, and what we might do. Following Denmark’s lead, here’s some of the thinking behind the Australian Reduction Roadmap for Australia
As noted separately, we just launched an Australian Reduction Roadmap, as an open movement to get whole lifecycle emissions, crucially including embodied emissions limits, meaningfully represented in Australian building regulations. The Roadmap deliberately follows the model of the Danish Reduction Roadmap. This would mean, simply, working towards our construction codes align with climate science by working within planetary boundaries as soon as possible, and thus contributing to Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement’s goals.
That in itself is more complex than it sounds. And certainly more challenging. And importantly, the emphasis on science in the roadmap means that the real work starts after the Roadmap, beyond it. As Dougald Hine suggests in At Work In The Ruins, blithely ‘following the science’ is not really possible, or even a good idea. But the role of the Roadmap is to ensure we all recognise where we are — to make clear the scale of change required, and the speed with which we must do so, if we are to stay within two degrees of global warming. In that, it 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. That’s The Number we need to reconcile ourselves with. This post goes into some of the thinking behind this approach, recognising that one aspect of strategic design is to create the conditions for systemic change.
Tilting the playing field
Given that the built environment sector is the most extractive on the planet, without such a systemic transformation in construction-related activities we will make things a lot worse. The Roadmap tries to bring this home by pointing out that, if we were to build the Australian housing targets of approximately 200,000 new homes per year, in any version of ‘business-as-usual’, that new building activity would consume around 200% of Australia’s total emissions budget. That’s the nation’s emissions budget for everything. So, in attempting to solve the housing crisis (albeit not really—see below) we would be making the climate crisis worse. Which of course would produce real crises, including for housing but for much else besides, exacerbating the bleak prognosis for this place.
The answer to this, as my colleague Mariana 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 and neighbourhoods, as well as industry and government.
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).
We are aware that such a 98% drop is effectively impossible, particularly in this timeframe. As Indy Johar said when we spoke at our Retrofit Symposium in 2023, asking any business to transform the key aspect of their operations ‘by around 98%’ is really an entirely new business—you cannot simply ‘efficiency’ your way to that magnitude of change, through incremental improvements of the same model.
In that sense, the Roadmap is perhaps what I’d call a ‘Macguffin’ in strategic design vocabulary: The Number is simply the initially compelling excuse to grab an audience’s attention, but the real story is elsewhere, what unfolds next. I’ll get to that below.
It’s still important that the numbers are robust. Our team at Melbourne create the EPiC database, a detailed open-access database of lifecycle profiles for materials, and builds models of emissions bottom-up, for both embodied and operational emissions. The team (Rob Crawford, James Helal and André Stephan) take into account likely future decarbonisation as well as climatic variations across different states. Equally, there’s no doubt the numbers will shift, as we continue to refine these models, and work with real data in a sector traditionally ‘allergic’ to truly meaningful data on environmental performance and impact. And as we illustrate in the Roadmap, the targets should be a moving feast, allowing us to speed up through innovation as well as developing different approaches to deploying emissions budgets effectively. There will be many quibbles with our approach, no doubt, including our own numerous disagreements about how to calculate a ‘fair share’ for Australia’s emissions budget, what to average, what to exclude, what to focus on, and so on.
However, adjusting any those variables will not shift the eventual number by an order of magnitude. Denmark found approximately the same result, and our research indicates it’s likely a similar picture across most so-called ‘Global North’ contexts.
About the Roadmap, and its Danish forebears
TERROIR’s Gerard Reinmuth and I started discussing this initiative a year ago. Gerard, with one foot in Denmark and the other in Australia, had started discussing the Danish Reduction Roadmap with some of its originators ‘down the road’ from TERROIR’s Copenhagen studio. I also typically have one eye on the Nordics, and had approached the Danish team (hello Martin from CEBRA) completely separately, in late 2023. Gerard and I quickly decided to work together to approach the Australian Reduction Roadmap as if a simple ‘Save as..’ of a Danish original. The Danish Reduction Roadmap has been an inspiration for many of us over the last few years, indicating how to build a industry-, community- and municipally-led movement that can effectively lobby for regulatory change, contributing to the result that Danish building regulations now have emissions limits in place for new buildings. According to Gerard, it has got to the point that few industry meetings in Denmark take place without first referencing embodied emissions in buildings, and that is largely down to the Roadmap’s impact. Over the last year we have worked closely with key members of the Danish consortium, particularly Dani Hill-Hansen and Kasper Reimer Bjørkskov, who were then at EFFEKT in Copenhagen—as well as Martin Møller Vilhelmsen from CEBRA who answered my initial email—to understand their approach and get as close to their model as possible. This means the Australian roadmap is the second out there, after Denmark, and by taking the same approach — the same method (albeit with a significant change—see below) and essentially the same visuals — we are implicitly suggesting the possibility of a global movement of such roadmaps. (We’ve heard some in Sweden and the UK are working on equivalents, for instance — do join us!)
The ‘we’ above is Melbourne School of Design researchers (principally, our building lifecycle emissions experts Rob Crawford, James Helal and André Stephan, and me) working with the Danish/Australian architecture practice TERROIR (particularly Gerard, as well as Sarah-Jane Wilson and Mikkel Moller Roesdahl) and Tim Schork at QUT. Huge thanks to all these people, including Dani and Kaspar who so generously shared their work with us. I’d note that elsewhere in Australia, UNSW’s Philip Oldfield has also been tirelessly working in this direction, to good effect.
Crucially, however, the Roadmap is an open movement. ‘We’ will update the documents and websites, and continue to share the messages repeatedly—and answer your emails!—but this will only work if people can openly and visibly join. So we hope that ‘we’ now includes you.
I won’t describe the method, and findings, in detail here as we worked hard to make the presentation as clear as possible—download it via the links at reductionroadmap.au/—and read the announcement post. Essentially, the approach defines an emissions budget for Australia, based on a planetary boundaries perspective, and then allocates a ‘fair share’ of this to new housing, for both embodied and operational emissions. That suggests a reasonable average limit for new housing, and then indicates how we might step down towards that, from today’s average, over the coming years. Simple!
Of course, it’s anything but. We hint at some possible ways forward, noting that new Australian housing is typically wasteful — being the largest in the world on average, often constructed without regard for climate science, and utterly out-of-kilter with housing space demands based on actual household size. Instead, we place the emphasis in the work such that it clearly suggests a series of approaches. That can include reducing the volume of new housing built, unlocking housing space by other means, and the size of new houses built, for example, given that size is Australia’s Achilles Heel. That might give us ~27kg to ‘work with’, rather than 6kg (still a 90%+ drop), whilst stretching the timeframe out into the 2030s (which unfortunately reduces the likelihood of containing warming to 2 degrees).
Yet this first Roadmap deliberately holds back from detailed strategy and policy directions. At this point, it is enough to get the numbers out there. We can’t help but hint at such directions—see page 34!—yet as with the Danish approach, a version 2 will feature examples and directions (and please get in touch to share them), whilst a version 3 will move beyond the simple emissions-based lens to include biodiversity, water- and land-use, and other systemic factors.
Social justice and climate justice
Although all construction is equally problematic, including commercial and infrastructural, we chose housing as it is often approached, albeit perhaps unwittingly, as if it is somehow separate to climate-related challenges. Mariana Mazzucato and I unpack this flawed positioning in more detail in our recent paper Modern Housing: An environmental common good.
As housing is the overwhelming strategic priority of most Australian governments (as elsewhere), it should get attention if we point out that climate science suggests that we cannot actually build housing, if approached business-as-usual — so we need to radically rethink. As noted above, we would use our entire emissions budget if we built Australian housing targets. I pursued this lead based on my UCL colleague Josh Ryan-Collins (et al) previously finding that result for the UK’s new housing targets back in 2022. Equally, this a paper this month reports a similar finding for Germany; that, despite “optimistic assessments of construction methods and decarbonisaton”, housing will still “fall short of carbon neutrality targets in 2045 and beyond.”
Moreover, as David Madden and Peter Marcuse point out In Defense of Housing, “the built form of housing has always been seen as a tangible, visual reflection of the organisation of society… Every emancipatory movement must deal with the housing question in one form of another. This capacity to spur the political imagination is part of housing’s social value as well.” And so we see the potential of using housing as a lever to “spur the political imagination” accordingly.
As noted in Modern Housing, we can no longer separate housing policy from climate policy—they are both pointing at the same materials, after all. Governments everywhere need to systemically combine these policy agendas and regulatory frameworks, and rapidly.
We are here to help with that. This does not mean that we cannot address housing affordability. But it does mean a necessary halt on the careless supply-side ‘build build build’ mantras that government and industry relentlessly parrot. Housing affordability is not tightly or significantly related to supply of new homes. The aforementioned paper on German housing finds a similar “need for housing policies that go beyond simply increasing the supply.” In the list of possible ways forward, we point to the potential of mass retrofit of existing space as well as numerous fiscal and economic policy reforms, recognising the possibility in the housing space (and material sunk within) that we already have, and its ability to meet demand.
But in terms of new-build, there are ways forward too, and the Roadmap’s confronting numbers help with our framing here.
For instance, the only true gap in the Australian housing market — given that we actually have an over-provision of privately-owned housing space — is in public and community-led housing. We have approximately 13 million unused bedrooms in Australia—including 3.6 million properties with three of more spare bedrooms—and hundreds of thousands of completely empty houses (never mind commercial properties that could be retrofitted), and mostly located in existing population centres. And yet it has one of the smallest proportions of public housing in the OECD, almost an order of magnitude less than the Netherlands. So in reality, from a policy perspective, we should perhaps focus our remaining emissions budget for new-build solely on this gap; on making new public housing and encouraging community-led housing, like cooperative-led projects. As Mariana and I note, housing is affordable if it is made affordable.
Those buildings must be convivial, beautiful, healthy, and comprise low-to-no embodied and operational emissions. The public sector can innovate here in a way that the private sector cannot, using its capability and responsibility to redesign markets and industries. We saw the power of public procurement at scale in the development of previous construction sectors e.g. the 1960s Swedish Million Programme and its ilk, optimising the development of concrete flat-panel systems. A contemporary approach would drive diverse innovation across the sector, not only in terms of quantitative measures—quicker and cheaper to construct, much cheaper and healthier to live in, and inventively deploying biogenic materials from regenerative sources rather than flat-panel concrete, of course—but as we can see in recent London public housing or Barcelona cooperative housing, for example, in terms of quality too. Alongside this, the possibility of prioritising the emissions budget on retrofitting existing public housing, as indicated in OFFICE’s exemplary work on Melbourne’s 1940s-era public housing, or Karakusevic Carson’s inspiring research in the UK.
The sheer intransigence of Roadmap’s numbers forces us to think a little harder about what a more meaningful and equitable housing market would look like. This is one possibility for using the Roadmap; for instance, in asking us to stop and rethink in terms of emissions, we find an argument for prioritising carefully-designed and built public and community-led housing, producing social justice as well as climate justice.
Similarly, we can use the Roadmap’s articulation of the emissions budget to make clear that mass retrofit of the existing environment needs to take precedence over new-build. Similarly, if we can’t reach for the deceptively easy tool of supply-side new-build, we must find ways to unlock the vast over-provision of housing space that already exists—say, by creating incentives for downsizing. And so on. If, as Igor Stravinsky suggests, “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self”, the Roadmap’s apparently tight constraints might be hugely generative, freeing up fresh approaches to the apparently intractable Housing Question.
The budget beyond building
This approach to an emissions budget, linked to a bottom-up understanding of embodied emissions (including so-called scope 3 emissions), could provide policy perspectives beyond the construction aspects of the built and living environment. In Australia, a Reduction Roadmap for Mobility is sorely needed, given the dominance of oversized, emitting vehicles such as SUVs. Using the emissions budget approach described above, transposed to mobility, could allow us to use materials to shape mobility markets and systems in the same way, ensuring that they also work towards the safe operating space. As I note in Bruteforcing the City, Herrington et al (part of the SoS MinErals research programme) presented findings to UK Parliament indicating that even that single country’s electric vehicle targets would surpass planetary boundaries due to their demands on finite materials, never mind the emissions associated with their production, use, and disposal.
“To meet UK electric car targets for 2050 (all cars and vans electric by 2050 and all sales to be purely battery electric by 2035) we would need to produce just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and 12% of one year’s total annual production of mined copper.” — Herrington et al (2019)
Rather than assuming an endless supply of vehicles (as with houses), by working with the idea of an emissions budget with planetary boundaries (and ultimately, a regenerative approach to biodiversity alongside) we might instead think about what vehicles are possible and necessary (also focusing on size, materiality, need, equity, ownership models, re-use and so on.) As with housing, this suggests a completely different approach to policy, industrial and otherwise, across the board, starting with what materials, and emissions budget, we have to work with, and shaping production accordingly.
Questions over answers, at this stage
However, there is no nationally recognised emissions budget, despite Australia being a Paris Agreement signatory. The country is a laggard, generally, on climate measures, as I describe in my Beyond the Roadmap essay. We are not naïve about this. This Roadmap can only be one of many actions. But we hope that it helps to clarify the situation, taking an objective science-based approach to simply ‘clear the decks’, such that we can ultimately find some space for more artful questions about how we live well within planetary boundaries.
When writing the presentation of the Roadmap, I thought it appropriate to at least suggest a set of ways forward, and ran this by the team—yet we held back from didactically making a simplistic list of answers. The eight themes on page 34 of the presentation (download here) can be thought of more as ingredients to make multiple dishes with, rather than a ready-baked fixed strategy. They should offer up a diversity of possibility and invention. They include the mass retrofit of existing places, necessary architectural invention, a ‘less but better’ approach to housing space, the systemic innovation across regenerative biogenic materials, fabrication and renewable energy sources, as well as fiscal reform and public leadership. There are no doubt more.
But each of these relies on ‘tilting that playing field’, using regulation, policy and leadership, to create the conditions for these public sector, private sector, and community-led practices to thrive.
The shift towards embodied emissions
A key difference in the Australian approach is that we wish to highlight that the most complex challenge ahead concerns embodied emissions (the material supply chains and construction-related processes), rather the ‘operational’ emissions which we have been focusing on in recent decades. The latter is, in retrospect, clearly ‘the easy bit’; the low-hanging fruit of fixing insulation, installing LEDs, solar panels and heat pumps, passive design, walkable neighbourhoods, and so on. Moving upstream, into materials and their extraction, processing, fabrication and recycling, is the built environment sector’s weakness, an increasing proportion of buildings’ footprint. With some honourable exceptions, we are at base camp one in an Everest’s worth of change. Even timber—that most obvious, traditional, well-understood, adaptable and refined low-emissions building material—comprises a mere 3% of all new construction in Europe.
The way we highlight this embodied emissions challenge in this first iteration of the roadmap, is to not pretend we can ‘amortise’ emissions over a building’s typical fifty year lifecycle. Put simply, the greenhouse gas emissions from the construction process are in the atmosphere from day one, and stay there — at least until we invent a giant space hoover to remove them, and there’s no sign of that being worth an existential bet any time soon. And with the imperative to limit and halt warming as rapidly as possible, we have to focus on emissions in the next few years, not in fifty. In other words, that current average emissions of 461kg of CO₂e emissions is calculated as being produced from ‘day one’ whenever we make a new house, and stay there each year. Hence we have to pull that annualised figure down to 6.63 kgCO₂e per square metre per year. (Again, these are all averages, but indicate the magnitude of change we are dealing with.) In other words, that Number indicates the emissions limit we can reasonably produce each year, in order to stay within our ‘national budget’, within planetary boundaries. It’s what Paris implies for buildings.
(The Danish model stays within their regulatory context — it’s nice that they have a context to stay within! — by spreading their equivalent total over a fifty year lifecycle. In essence, that approach tries to recognise that making a building’s materials last a long time is a good goal. Which it is. The theory would be to say, for example,“Let’s use high quality bricks, and if they last 300 years, surely the emissions produced making the brick can effectively be spread out over that period?” Our approach says, sadly not; the fossil fuel-intensive process of making a brick means that the damaging emissions are produced in year one, and stay there. For those of us that love brick—I’m British after all—we will want to be exploring stone once again, which is exciting!, as well as numerous biogenic, recycled or reimagined alternatives. We should incentivise the ‘long life, low energy, loose fit’ approach that Alex Gordon proposed in 1972 — but we now need to recognise that embodied emissions have a long life too. We need to prevent those being produced during these crucial next few years. Our Danish colleagues agree with our approach, for what it’s worth; their building regulations do not, yet. Apparently France is taking a similar approach to us. It’ll be interesting to observe the differing approaches here.)
I also want to note that focusing on materials means more than simply emissions. As noted in Modern Housing, material extraction also means biodiversity degradation and ecosystem collapse, water system collapse, inequitable land-use, forced dislocation, loss of livelihood and culture — and in Australia, destruction of Country. We have not emphasised these aspects in the emissions-focused ‘version 1.0’ as we are following the Danish lead. So we will move towards our translation of the Danes’ Beyond the Roadmap follow-up— which I was honoured to be part of, contributing an essay to the report — and which indicates how to connect transformation of construction to regeneration of biodiversity.
A new materialism
We are aware of how confronting this will be for the construction and property development sectors — but it may equally be so for architects, engineers and designers. It might feel like the ability to design and build is so heavily curtailed that it feels akin to a moratorium on new construction. That is not the intention— although, according to IPCC lead author Yamina Saheb, architecture is behind all other disciplines in its approach to the climate crisis, and no discipline gets to blithely decide what is important purely on its own terms.
But it does suggest a necessary reconciliation with different forms of practice, and perhaps even a reinvention as much as rediscovery. Personally, I find the idea of a ‘material turn’ in architecture incredibly compelling, full of possibility. There are numerous practices, including in Australia, that are exploring how to work with new and old practices, materials, and technologies. Engaging more directly with materials — and the places, cultures, practices and technologies they imply — offers new possibilities. But imagining an architecture that rarely touches concrete, steel or brick — materials we should be using very sparingly from now on — suggests a radical transformation of current practices. We might think of this, perhaps, as ‘a new materialism’, recognising that a building’s materials existed before the building, and they will exist after—the building is a particular configuration of those materials, a brief moment in time before they ‘move on’ elsewhere. This is reorientation of design practice around material cultures, human interactions, natural flows and systems, and deep time durations.
(As noted in both Modern Housing: An environmental common good and in my recent piece on Colin Ward, these practices might include the likes of Material Cultures, Mae-ling Lokko, Nori Architects, Malmö’s Materialbanken, Wikihouse, VUILD, EFFEKT, OFFICE, Mio Tsuneyama and Fuminori Nousaku, Taisugar Circular Village in Taiwan, and many more. Many forward-thinking practices in Australia are moving precisely in this direction. We had what I called ‘the softest of soft-launches’ for the Roadmap at MSD a couple of weeks ago, and benefited hugely from the interest and expertise of local practices Fieldwork, Breathe, BKK, Hassell, Relative Projects, Finding Infinity, Simulaa, and Arup in the room, alongside Gerard from TERROIR and my colleagues from Melbourne School of Design. Speaking to the latter, we are developing new approaches to biogenic materials via collaboration with our Faculty of Science, and our agricultural campus at Dookie, again learning from trailblazers like the Royal Danish Academy’s CINARK, Atelier LUMA and others.)
When presenting work like this to audiences, I usually pause to ask whether anybody knows where any of the materials in the building they are sitting in came from.
“What is this room made of? Where does it come from?”
You might ask yourself the same question, of whichever room you’re in right now. Have a look around. What’s in the wall? Where does that come from? What are the columns made of and where does that come from? Who made the bricks? What’s the whiteboard made of? From where? No-one ever knows. Even the industry experts in the room — including me, I guess — almost always never know. Drawing from Val Plumwood’s thinking, the shadow places that produce the Global North have been pushed further into the shadows. This lack of awareness of provenance would not have been the case, perhaps only a century ago. It is odd that we tend not to know where much of our material world comes from; the clothes we wear, the chair we’re sitting on, the phone in our hand — although we should note that the industries behind the latter objects and products are generally far more advanced in circularity, design for disassembly, or material provenance than the built environment sector. The designers and engineers at Apple can articulate the material supply chains that produce AirPods, say, and in detail. Clothing companies like Sweden’s Asket or Melbourne‘s ABC.H track down their sources as if detectives. Motor vehicles increasingly have end-of-life or extended ‘producer responsibility’, in Europe at least. New buildings — the things we actually reside in, sleep in, work in, breathe in, live in — are nowhere nearly as developed in this respect. Amin Taha has written powerfully of the ethical transformation this must imply for built environment design and planning practice.
The small book Material Reform by the UK-based practice Material Cultures is one the best primers on all this, just as their work indicates much of the possibility of this new (or old) form of architecture. The challenges are ethical, political, economic, and above all environmental. But this richer understanding of materiality—and the tactile, legible, seamful integration of narrative, place and poetics as well as material choices, assembly and disassembly—is also beginning to emerge as new, or sometimes old, aesthetic possibility. It suggests a different conception of beauty. This is the way out of The Number’s otherwise vice-like grip, for new-build and retrofit.
Theory of change: show don’t tell
Finally, it is always worth asking after the ‘theory of change’ behind such initiatives. How will producing The Number — that required 98% drop in emissions — help produce the intended outcome, a transformation of our built environment practices?
As we note in the document, such numbers don’t tell us what to do. They are only numbers. In this case, they indicate the scale of change required, but numbers such as this, and related forms of data or ‘evidence’, in themselves, are next to useless in terms of motivating systemic change. Data is something to be worked with, not taken at face value as if useful in itself.
As I often remark, it’s not as if it’s simply a case of getting the Prime Minister to email the data everyone in Australia. What then? Do they read the email, pause briefly for a little think, and then simply say “Oh, now you’ve shown me the numbers, here’s my car keys, I’ll cancel that home extension, and never eat meat again.” By far the majority already recognise we’re in a mess and most want something to be done about it. Presenting yet more evidence does little to enhance understanding or truly build consensus, never mind produce collective action — whether citizen, politicians or policymakers (the latter pair being bound to what they think the former thinks.) Habits are set — and locked-in genetically it seems — based around an often reasonable aversion to change. Despite steps forward, mindsets and behaviours are remarkably static, given the vast amount of high quality climate research produced over the last four or five decades. Again, people know. But they cannot, or will not, do, which leaves the view through the Overton Window cloudy at best, preventing more meaningful systemic change at the institutional level. (This is the Catch-22 for traditional policymaking: how to open the window to produce change, building consensus that the window might be opened in the first place. But this is strategic design’s capability to explore behaviour change first, and attitudes second, unlocks movement, with a range of tools available, from popular media to everyday strategic prototypes. Such approaches aim to generate new evidence through activity, rather than waiting for ‘a priori’ evidence to be understood and assembled as if a legitimate precursor to activity.)
This thought should be concerning to traditional academic practice, of course, focused as it is on producing reliable evidence but for formats almost no-one engages with (academic publishing) and largely in what my colleague Marco Steinberg calls ‘document knowledge’ i.e. a very particular kind of knowledge capable of being contained in the format of a document. Equally, elected representative models now tend to reinforce existing power structures rather than shift them, just as intransigent-rather-than-adaptive built environments reinforce yesterday’s infrastructure choices and living patterns (e.g. car dependency). So describing policy approaches — like incentives for downsizing or a retrofit-first urban agenda or a reforested Victoria — simply bounce off the hardened exterior of calcified practices and narrow vested interests. We also recognise that a negative framing of the climate crisis usually does little to motivate action—nor does a realistic framing, which assumes we would act once we knew the extent of the crisis. And recalling Hine, ‘following the science’ is rarely as straightforward as it sounds.
However, we do not believe that it is appropriate to hide these numbers. We would rather they were out there, associated with an imperative for change, connected with one of the primary concerns of everyday life in housing, and framed as only the first step, a ‘clearing of the decks’ in order to stimulate a discussion about the numerous meaningful actions already available to us.
Far better to use design’s capability to produce tangible settings in which to encounter other ideas. So the bigger picture of this work is to follow up this first piece — The Number — with compelling descriptions of the viable alternatives that already around us — inspiring projects and practices — and then move on to producing tangible ‘systems demonstrators’, which indicate future possibilities today, through experiential engagement i.e. real projects on the ground, engaging multiple forms of knowledge, which can provoke meaningful questions in public. This means engaging with and activating culture, in almost every sense of that complex word, as much as science. Show don’t tell at system-scale. Systems prototypes — emphasis on the prototype — should not require a priori evidence in order to be instigated. They can generate new evidence as they go, creating a legible vapour trail of policy insights, public discourse, engagement and momentum which can be crystallised into action, some of which can be widely distributed to produce systemic change. (As described in Designing Missions.)
But this is the first step; recognise where we are, and clear the decks. All that remains is to ask you to download and read the document and get in touch if you support the movement. We’ve carefully written ‘the ask’, again following the Danish principles, such that it is both reasonable and ambitious: recognising climate science within the building regulations, essentially:
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.
We recognise that slamming the brakes on a system in motion is rarely practical, a good idea, or even doable in many cases. We also need people to still be in business in order to transform their business. So the document’s FAQ section makes clear that we are not asking you to stop projects, ‘down tools’, or radically transform personally. We recognise the issue with framing the climate crisis as the concern of individuals rather than as broader political agendas and power structures. That is why we are placing emphasis on changing the regulatory context, again recognising this need to ‘tilt the playing field’ for everyone, towards common good outcomes. As we write, we know that there are more than enough committed, inventive and capable individuals who can then respond with innovative action. We just need to ensure that legislation and policy settings can encourage, rather than discourage, these actions.
Please do download and read the Australian Reduction Roadmap presentation, and get in touch with us, and others, to express your broad support, or ask questions. Together we aim to build a critical mass of companies, organisations and institutions who actively support this fundamental rethink of building regulations, and can then demonstrate that through projects, actions and practices. The Number is only a first step.
Many thanks to Gerard Reinmuth for the many enlightening discussions about these approaches, as well as Dani Hill-Hansen and Kasper Reimer Bjørkskov for their generous insights.
For more on approaches to housing policy and practice, do read Modern Housing: An environmental common good by me and Mariana Mazzucato:
Here’s the related post announcing the Australian Reduction Roadmap:
And I’ve had to get my head around the detail of embodied emissions in construction over the last years as best I can, but if you have detailed technical questions on the bottom-up calculations, please do direct them to my colleagues Rob, James and André! They will happily engage on the details. For more on their EPiC Database, which is the comprehensive open-access Life Cycle Inventory of environmental flow coefficients for construction materials behind some of these numbers, please visit:
Finally, here’s a new project I’m fortunate to be an advisor to, part of a European-wide movement from Laudes Foundation—Homes that Don’t Cost the Earth: Affordability within planetary boundaries—working with Dark Matter Labs, Arup, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and Rising Tide. It will follow similar logics to our work here!
