hipótesis especificas Hipótesis Especifico 1

The principal objective of the research presented in this chapter was to understand the economic, technical, practical and cultural barriers preventing construction professionals from selecting a variety of materials commonly identified as being lower in embodied carbon. A review of previous studies assessing barriers to adoption of more sustainable practices in the construction industry revealed a common set of cultural and institutional barriers. The survey and interview results strongly suggest that these barriers also prevent alternative material choice as a means of mitigating embodied carbon emissions. Many of the observed barriers are common across materials with uptake restricted by: perceptions of high costs;

a shortage of knowledge and skills; inadequate design time to allow consideration of novel options; inadequate information from material producers and an inability to establish an effective or collective chain of responsibility. Design teams are also hampered by the poor availability of product and building level carbon data and benchmarks.

The industry can seek to overcome these barriers by encouraging earlier engagement of supply chains, effective use of whole life costing, and changes to contract and tender documents. The industry must work harder to maximise the value sustainability consultants and material experts can bring to projects by ensuring initial engagement in the early project stages, regular communication and appropriate time for review of designs. Additional training is required for many practitioners, and firms engaging in their first embodied carbon assessments must have structures in place to ensure learning is rolled over from project to project and disseminated internally. The industry must also share the accumulated knowledge on embodied carbon. This includes uploading data to common repositories to allow for benchmarking; sharing standardised reporting forms and openly discussing their

successes and failures. Similarly, low carbon product manufacturers must improve the synthesis and dissemination of information to designers. Improvements in this regard are critical in bridging the gap between knowledge and perceptions of low carbon materials.

The industry must not wait on regulation to act but continue to develop the business case and be proactive in encouraging clients to engage in assessment. It is important that designers and contractors do not simply view themselves as ‘project executers’ (Wong et al., 2013) but as key ‘middle-actors’ (as described by Janda, Killip, & Fawcett (2014)) that can promote best practice downstream to clients and upstream to policy makers. In many cases, practitioners are still struggling to demonstrate the value of carbon assessment to clients. Without a more robust business case, supported by evidence of the anticipated benefits – particularly for the disputed cost savings – it will remain difficult to engage clients.

Projects that have successfully measured and reduced embodied carbon typically benefit from a highly motivated client that places clear and challenging requirements in the tender documents, common incentives in contracts, and encourages early engagement of the full supply chain. These client-led actions are the simplest way to overcome partisan relationships between professions and to ensure collective responsibility for carbon reduction. There is a clear opportunity for clients to motivate further action on embodied carbon without enabling legislation. Clients must also be proactive in sharing their expertise and experiences, allowing for mutually beneficial improvements such as standardising embodied carbon reporting forms for sub-contractors. Engaged individuals within client organisations should seek to include embodied carbon assessment within their mandatory or voluntary carbon disclosure to embed consideration and continuous improvement within their organisation.

There is a role for professional institutions to facilitate this knowledge transfer between firms and foster an embodied carbon community. Cultivating a healthy community of experts and advocates will be vital in ensuring embodied carbon remains an ongoing concern within an industry that faces many competing agendas. Institutions can provide training courses and guidance; fund key demonstration projects; independently gather cost data to flesh out the business case; and help disseminate lessons learnt by early actors. The active engagement of professional institutions could also bring credibility to an issue that is still viewed with scepticism by some policy makers and industry practitioners.

Universities can support knowledge and skills development by including a greater focus on embodied carbon assessment and low carbon design in their curricula. There is also scope for further qualitative research charting the awareness and uptake of alternative materials, monitoring the emergence and dissolution of barriers to their use, and providing advice for practitioners and policy makers on

practical steps to overcome these barriers.

Ultimately regulation will also be required to build upon the early work of moral leaders. This regulation must simultaneously motivate embodied carbon assessment and support producers of low carbon materials. Local and international precedents have already been discussed at length in Section 2.3, and the options for future regulation are considered further in Chapter 7. The combination of early industry action and regulation could support swift development of expertise, faster data gathering and the growth of an industry with significant export potential. There is an opportunity for early actors to become world leaders in a growing industry that will support skilled jobs, develop the market for alternative materials and achieve significant reductions in GHG emissions. Promoting the UK’s comparative advantage in low carbon manufacturing by stimulating domestic demand for low carbon building products could support the strategic goal, set out in Construction 2025, of making the UK a world leader in low carbon exports. However, this is unlikely to occur without substantive new drivers.

In the parlance of innovation theorists, embodied carbon assessment and the manufacture of low carbon products remains within the ‘formative phase’. Innovation theory suggests that growth beyond this phase typically necessitates institutional changes, entry of new firms and formation of advocacy groups. Unfortunately there is little evidence, as yet, of significant institutional changes, with minimal engagement from professional institutes and the exclusion of embodied carbon from the mainstream political discourse. New firms developing low carbon building products have struggled to gain a foothold in a market dominated by a handful of large producers. The UK has also seen significantly higher failure rates for new producers compared with countries such as Germany and France (Newman, 2013).

Furthermore – with the notable exception of the timber lobby – advocacy groups for low carbon products, such as the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products, are still in their infancy and are small relative to their mainstream counterparts. It is unlikely that such small groups representing a diverse range of products will ever develop the lobbying capacity and political influence of the dominant producers.

In the meantime, uptake of low carbon building products has often been restricted to niche-like environments created by unique project contexts (Jones et al., 2015).

Geels (2004) outlines how technologies developed in niches can emerge through ‘windows of opportunity’ to change an overarching socio-technical regime and break existing industry path dependencies. In the case of embodied carbon assessment and low carbon building products it remains to be seen how such a window of opportunity could materialize. Whilst climate change has applied pressure at a landscape level and resulted in sectoral targets for emissions abatement, accounting and regulatory approaches have prevented translation of this pressure into action on embodied carbon. It is likely that such a window of opportunity will

only be generated in one of three circumstances.

First, if the marginal cost of abating embodied emissions was significantly less than abating operational emissions. Conceivably, as designers are forced to approach the nearly zero energy buildings envisioned by the EU EPBD, this may necessitate the adoption of increasingly complex and expensive technological solutions to achieve marginal increases in operational energy performance. In such circumstances it may be more cost effective to achieve comparable whole life emission reductions by adopting alternative building materials with reduced operational energy performance but lower embodied carbon. However, if whole life cycle savings were to be effectively valued - allowing for selection of the cheapest abatement option - it would require recognition of both operational and embodied emissions within standardised accounting procedures and regulation. Such amendments may help achieve the “cost-optimal” balance targetted by the EPBD but would require resolution of the previously discussed concerns surrounding allocation of embodied emissions and generation of product data.

A second window of opportunity could be stimulated by the combined uptake of BIM and life cycle costing. Attaching carbon and cost information to components in BIM could ease the calculation process and allow designers to explore the embodied emissions implications of alternative designs. The additional retention of building material information also has the potential to support greater recovery of materials and value at end of life. Both of these factors could highlight the significance of materials in carbon and financial budgets. This could alter the mind-set of designers and make it easier to generate a business case around material changes. However, the limited uptake to date of life cycle tools such as Rapiere suggests that additional incentives beyond current rating scheme innovation credits may be required to stimulate uptake. The UK industry has also experienced substantial difficulties in rolling out BIM Level 2. Implementation of higher BIM Levels will doubtless prove even more challenging. Retention of building material information also requires retention and updating of the corresponding building models over many decades. It remains to be seen if this will be achieved in practice, particularly through transfers of building ownership.

A third window of opportunity may arise during the 5th-8th Carbon Budgets as the UK operates within an increasingly constrained carbon space. If the UK has exhausted more cost effective mitigation options elsewhere, or is struggling to achieve the changes in behaviour and infrastructure necessary to support targeted emissions reductions in other major sectors of the economy, past actions suggest that the remaining burden is likely to be placed upon more heavily regulated sectors, such as construction. Similarly, beyond 2050, the net zero emissions goal implied by the Paris Agreement may require that any remaining emissions can be cost effectively offset with additional carbon sinks. Given the UK’s current land

use and prospects for CCS, there is clearly a limited volume of low cost carbon sinks that the UK can develop. Achieving further reductions through additional mitigation measures for embodied carbon in construction may prove preferable to further changes in land use or dependence upon expensive negative emissions technologies such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. This could result in a progressive ratcheting up of construction emissions reduction targets which would necessitate more substantive action on embodied carbon. The likelihood of such a scenario is further explored in Chapter 6.