COP28: Noise and Progress

Disclosure: This guest op-ed comes from Lisa Richmond, Hon. AIA, who is a senior fellow with Architecture 2030. BuildingGreen, alongside SERA Architects, recently consulted with Architecture 2030 and several other green building organizations to facilitate consensus and develop reporting guidelines for the Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization (ECHO) Project. 

Exhausted but determined, COP28 negotiators worked through the night, sleeping on sofas and shuttling between meeting rooms and the warm Dubai night. But by early morning, high-fives in the hall signaled an achievement that was unthinkable just 24 hours earlier: getting 200 countries, including oil-dependent nations, to publicly state that yes, fossil fuels are causing the climate crisis, and we have to move on from them.

It was understandable, then, that this achievement dominated headlines, which tend to reduce the UN climate summits to a single metric. But COP (Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) is about so much more than one agreement. Negotiated outcomes this year included a critical climate-justice achievement: a Loss and Damage Fund to address the harms caused to climate-vulnerable nations by big polluters like the U.S. and Europe. Commitments to double renewable energy and triple efficiency also grabbed headlines.

Beyond the highs and lows of multilateral negotiation, so much more happens at COP, much of it inspiring and hopeful. Says former UNFCCC secretary Christiana Figueres, “The pace and scale of the transition is not in the hands of governments. It’s in the hands of market forces. It’s in the hands of citizens.” The COPs offer a global stage for these citizens—people like you and me—to connect, inspire, and commit. 

Climate-justice solidarity 

These connections are critical, because action can’t wait. People across the world are already suffering the real-life consequences of our historic emissions. As a delegate, standing in solidarity with leaders from countries like Tuvalu, Bermuda, or Kiribati—people whose very existence is threatened by a changing climate—makes the call to decarbonize and adapt feel urgent and real. “In the end, the climate crisis is not about pledges, statistics, reports, or activists,” writes activist Vanessa Nakate. “It’s about human suffering and ruined lives.”

As major contributors to global GHG emissions, buildings bear some responsibility for the harm those emissions cause. Beyond emissions, many common construction materials negatively impact the health and well-being of the people who extract and manufacture them. Centering those who are most harmed by climate change means we must deploy every tool in our toolkit to redress those harms and contribute to solutions.

New leverage for our industry

BuildingGreen readers know that there is no way for us to stay within our remaining carbon budget without addressing our built world. We need world leaders to know that too.

While a Built Environment presence has been growing within the UN for several years, national governments still underemphasize the carbon mitigation opportunities in buildings, landscape, and infrastructure. Important national mitigation commitments, enshrined in each country’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), often include some nod to operating carbon (usually via energy code requirements), but rarely go further. 

Through the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, a coalition of governments, NGOs, and businesses, is working to change that. Architecture 2030 helped launch the coalition at COP21 in Paris, and at COP26 issued the 1.5°C COP26 Communiqué on behalf of more than 70 firms and associations, urging more ambitious mitigation targets for the built environment. 

At COP28, we set out an ambitious agenda with four core messages:

• invest in nature-based solutions

• reduce the carbon from building materials

• prioritize building reuse

• scale up low-carbon building traditions

In more than a dozen presentations, our delegates made the urgent case for built environment solutions in national mitigation and adaptation plans. 

Global alignment on 2030 targets

That’s why the new UNEP Buildings Breakthrough couldn’t be more timely. Sponsored by France and Morocco, and launched at COP28, the Breakthrough hopes to harness both the leadership of sponsoring nation-states (the US is a signatory) and market forces to transform the industry.

Making near-zero buildings the norm by 2030 will be a familiar goal to leaders in architectural practice, but as a global rallying cry it is trail-blazing. Breakthroughs in other hard-to-abate sectors—steel, for example—have harnessed collaboration among finance, supply chains, and policy leaders to create an “ambition loop,” with some visible success.

In March of this year, France is hosting a Buildings and Climate Global Forum with an invitation list that includes ministers, NGOs, and industry leaders from the 28 countries that have endorsed the Breakthrough. The task: collaborate on a roadmap of high-level action needed to decarbonize the sector. 

Having a roadmap for action isn’t a new concept, but our joint articulation of the 2030 goal and our alignment around specific actions is happening at an unprecedented global scale. So this is a new, high-leverage opportunity to elevate the thinking we've already done into national policies around the world.

The forum will host working groups on high-emitting materials and systems, which is critical given their outsize impact (concrete and steel alone account for 16% of global emissions, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy). But it is equally critical that we focus global attention on first principles:

• promoting behaviors and choices that decrease consumption

• prioritizing passive solutions

• leaning into nature

• drawing on local knowledge 

Architecture 2030 is at the table as a planning partner for several key sessions, including Sufficiency (systems and policies which avoid demand for energy, materials, land, water, and resources within planetary boundaries), Heritage (learning from indigenous and traditional building principles), Circularity, and Bio-Based Materials.

We need to invest in change

The built environment is a massive burden to our planet and is a participant in the inequality gap.

Despite progress on per-square-meter indicators like EUI, overall embodied and operating emissions have continued to grow, according to the UN’s 2022 Global Status Report on Buildings and Construction.

For those of us who plan, design, and steward our built environment, our fossil fuel-free future must start now. Changing processes and expectations requires effort, commitment, and investment. But the cost of inaction is too high. 

Lisa Richmond, Hon. AIA, is founder of the Seattle-based consulting firm Climate Strategy Works and a senior fellow with Architecture 2030. She has been a delegate to COP26 in Glasgow, COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, and COP28 in Dubai.