A consideration of one of the elephants in the room: the time crunch to decarbonize and our challenges to effectively address it.
The shift towards net zero is currently undergoing a crisis. On the one hand, government and international bodies continue to drive towards decarbonization through new regulations, new laws, and new standards/expectations, focused on:
On the other hand, current market practices make transition by 2050 highly unlikely, if not impossible.
“Many of the projects that make up the built environment—our buildings, water and electrical systems, roads and bridges, and transportation systems—are [still] not being constructed in line with the world’s net-zero goals…
Moving the needle on net-zero emissions will be difficult. Our research shows that the world will need to invest $9.2 trillion each year until 2050 to achieve net-zero emissions in the built environment.”
“Decarbonizing The Built Environment,” McKinsey, 2022
In short: there is a time crunch. This gap - between expectations (laws, regulations, standards) and reality (market practices) - will continue to expand unless practical changes are enacted. These changes must consider, at the very least, the issue of volume: the number of buildings that need to be decarbonized, and the number of organizations that need access to pre-feasibility studies.
In a previous article, we highlighted that 159.71 million buildings will need to be decarbonized across North America by 2050. However, this issue is a problem even now, across Canada and the USA.
Canada: Canada’s population is likely to increase by almost 45% between now and 2050. In the next seven years alone, housing stock in Canada is expected to increase by 2.3 million units; ideally, the Canadian Mortgage & Housing Corp believes 5.8 million units are necessary.
In both these cases, this will also require additional infrastructure due to growing populations. Globally, the situation is similar, with current estimates (according to the International Energy Agency) indicating that, by 2030, global floor area is expected to increase by around 15%, which is equivalent to the entire built floor of North America today.
Without scaling access to pre-feasibility studies, it will be impossible to achieve our 2050 goals. It is today’s ultimate bottleneck. Current market practices cannot address the volume of retrofit and new building projects that must be assessed, planned, and designed.
OVR-VU is our response to this problem: decarbonizing the built, flows through us.
Comments