Observing COP26

For the last week I’ve been an accredited Observer at COP26, one of a group representing the Scottish Ecological Design Association, itself one of many non-party groups attending the 2-week event.

The conference failed to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees, our key task to avoid catastrophic impacts, and it will reconvene next year in Cairo. This wasn’t a surprise and the failure to deliver on finance was shameful, but there is much worth sharing.   

Coming to COP

I’ve spent a long summer working on projects leading up to COP - with students, young designers, plant people, artists, charities and communities, all talking about how climate change is affecting their lives and the world around them, their hopes and fears for the future. Lots of people engaged and alive to the need for change. So I came to Glasgow fully charged, ready to discuss, listen and learn how the world was responding to the challenge of our generation and what we should be doing here at home in Scotland.

What I experienced at COP was all the same hopes and fears writ large, and humanity divided. The powerful and the ignored. The yes and the no. The conference and the street. Inside the Blue Zone the powerful played power games between themselves. Too often it felt like a trade show for lobbyists. Too often it looked like financial interests regulating human interests, rather than the other way round, or as one young activist put it ‘continuing to privilege capital over life’.

The catchphrase was ‘partnership is the new leadership’, but it looked like partnerships only between those who already hold the benefits of wealth created by past carbon emissions and those who continue to pollute.

Pamela Escobar Vargas, C40 Global Youth and Mayors Forum, one of very few voices of youth in the Blue Zone

Change Leaders

The clearest commitment to progressive change was evident at sub-national level, where regional and city leaders with power to drive change within a defined geographic area are vested in the need for climate equity to deliver carbon reduction measures that improve the lives of voters.

People like David Ige, Governor, State of Hawai’i, USA, Abdellatif Mazouz, President of the Casablanca Settat Region, Morocco, Claudio Castro, Mayor of Renca, Chile and Matt Adler, Mayor of Austin, Texas who, in a state dominated by oil, has committed to 40% reduction in embodied carbon by 2030.

These are working as organised groups of change leaders to share best practice and lobby for influence. But as the articulate and organised argue for finance to allow cities to transform, we risk leaving others behind in rural areas, along with those with less good governance, which can only increase inequities and fuel unsustainable urbanisation. All the more important, as Marvin Rees the Mayor of Bristol argued, to avoid what is becoming a scattergun of small initiatives and announcements, and work for inclusive global financial strategies that can be equitably and efficiently targeted.

Build Better

Of course my focus was on construction, and there were some good discussions, but negligible commitment. Dame Jo Da Silva set the context.

A series of ‘change leaders’ were showcased, which would have been inspiring, but it just confirmed that we know what the problems and solutions are, we know it is urgent to deliver them, and yet we are failing to enact the change because we lack the political will.

It was like those grey days when you climb a mountain and find that the top is sitting above the clouds. You look out and see a range of shiny peaks in the distance, but the whole world below is shrouded and hidden. We saw a parade of shiny exemplars meant to inspire us, but there was persistent avoidance of facing the difficult issues, and no sight or sound of all the people hidden below.

Yet the UN made a strong call for delivery in a sector that has received little attention, but is vital to meet our targets.

Decoupling Construction from Carbon

Across several events, a wide range of speakers highlighted the key issue discussed at last week’s  SEDA/ACAN event on decarbonising construction. As the Transport sector cuts carbon by electrification and Energy moves to renewables, the Construction sector, already emitting 40% of global CO2, will become increasingly important. And as we reduce the emissions from the use of buildings by insulation and electric heating, so the embodied carbon of construction processes will become an increasingly key target for action.

Many speakers made the point that we must move from measuring theoretical carbon emissions in use to whole life carbon costing, but we are only just beginning to consider this and we must pick up the pace. The route is clear:

• start by measuring carbon through Building Standards - if we don’t measure, we can’t reduce

• set limits, that can be progressively tightened towards 2030

• use public procurement to signal change and help develop markets for bio-materials

• invest in R&D for bio-materials that can displace concrete, steel and petro-chemical products

• collaborate to plan a just transition that will sustain employment and commerce as we decouple construction from carbon and foster a circular economy, protecting the natural world

Targets Drive Behaviour

This was the pathway laid out by the UK Green Building Council as they launched their Whole Life Carbon Roadmap, a clear and robust plan, echoing the work of others across the Global Green Building Council.  Among the change leaders there was recognition that we also need change in business models as well as in materials, that gender inequality on construction is impeding progress, and that we need large scale interventions, not ‘building by building’ delivery.

A few places are leading on this, including France, which has passed a law requiring all new public buildings to be 50% bio-materials. Sirin Stav, Deputy Mayor of Oslo, demonstrated the role of public procurement in delivering zero carbon construction processes by stimulating the market for electric construction vehicles.

But the UK conversation was about roadmaps and aspirations, no commitments, no delivery. So this is a key area to target progress in the coming year.

So How Does Scotland Sit?

Scotland is a wealthy privileged country, having benefitted from 250 years of high carbon emissions. We have most of the buildings we need, while the world as a whole plans to double its buildings between now and 2050. We now have a national strategy to phase out gas and oil heating, and look for a strategy to retro-fit insulation. But there is not yet any plan to decarbonise construction and this is a glaring omission.

Patrick Harvie, our Green Party Minister for Zero Carbon Buildings, recognised the need to go further and the key challenge of delivering change in the construction sector. He signalled a willingness to use regulation to require change, and finance to enable it, but most impressively recognised that there needs to be a change of culture if we are to achieve a just transition. His speech held a lot of promise, and he will face many challenges to deliver it.

Neil Topping, COP26 High Level Climate Action Champion, put it well - ‘construction is a really challenging traditional sector, with complex fragmented supply chains, rigid procurement processes, very tight margins - a classic example of where we need systems transformation, no one actor alone can do radical transformation.’

If we are to deliver the target of a 50% reduction in embodied carbon by 2030, Scotland needs to act on this now, because it will be a complex and slow change process. Changing from gas boilers to electric over a decade is like the process of changing from petrol cars to electric, something than can be planned, regulated and incentivised over a natural cycle. Removing embodied carbon from the construction process is like turning an oil tanker around. It needs slow, well-coordinated and patient action over a long timescale. But the levers are there, if there is the political will to grasp them.

A Concrete Example

Mankind uses more concrete than anything else, apart from water, and it is responsible for 8% of global CO2 emissions. But rather than reducing, the market for concrete is predicted to double over the next decade, when our aim is to half embodied carbon. So it is vital to reduce the use of cement, to cut its carbon intensity and develop bio alternatives. This is one area where the developed world can help decarbonise the future growth in the global south, thereby easing its carbon debt.

The cement industry says it will decarbonise by using carbon capture & storage (CCS) and biomass fuels, and thus Norway is building a new plant to create ‘zero carbon cement’. But this is, as yet, an unproven technology and the places where cement is produced is not where CCS can be stored. Norway has 40% of the European CCS potential and the UK has another 40% - both under the North Sea where the oil used to be, so it seems unlikely to be a European, never mind a global, solution. In Scotland, the Dunbar Cement Works is our fourth largest single source of carbon emissions, and our CCS pilot project has been halted. Our carbon clock is ticking loud.

In any event, we mustn’t rely on one possible technical fix. Concrete is environmentally damaging in many other ways and has little place in our future circular economy. Sweden recently has its main cement factory closed down by the courts because of its mining impacts, not its carbon emissions, and concrete is a major contributor to the global sand crisis.

Remembering Those Not Present

What didn’t feature in any of the discussions was the importance of sustaining traditional construction materials and techniques, which are proven low-carbon, circular economy technologies with significant cultural value, but do not have big commercial interests to lobby for them. This is a big blind spot in strategic discussions.

When the voice of business was heard, it was the voice of big business - global developers, ‘the world’s biggest firm of Architects’, the voice of cities ‘where the carbon battle will be won or lost’. The widely-condemned exclusion of indigenous communities reflected a fundamental problem of scale created by the UK and UN in the COP process. COPP only does macro scale capitalist development perspectives.

Young, indigenous, island, disabled, disadvantaged, small-scale and alternative economic voices barely made it to any of the over-choreographed sessions and this lack of inclusion fundamentally undermined the whole COP26 process. Half the human family was simply not in the room for the discussion about its future and if this is not addressed in future COP conferences, then they will not succeed.

The lesson for us is that planning for climate change in Scotland must be an inclusive process, not resting in the hands of established power. We need the whole country to contribute if it is to succeed, and the commitment on the streets shows the determination we will need to deliver. It also reflects my work through the summer, where I found experience and talent in abundance away from the centres of power, which we will need to make the change. Minister Harvie’s speech still indicated the tired, top-down approach seen at COP, rather than building in community leadership and civic society participation around the power table.

Scotland can come away with a clear focus for specific action on the built environment, and we look to Minister Harvie for inclusive action and just delivery. It would be great to see the Scottish Government commit to a 50% cut in embodied carbon by 2030, before the meeting next year in Cairo, and to establish an inclusive Clean Carbon Construction Forum to guide its delivery. As he said in his speech, the legacy of COP26 is much more than the headline pronouncements from the Blue Zone.

There is now something deeper vested in the Scottish people who participated in these last two weeks at any level - meeting people from across the world, sharing their homes with them, their food, their streets, their hopes and their fears and gaining in return a wealth of understanding about the world we inhabit and the love that humanity shares for our planet home. This legacy, a beautiful gift from all the folk who cared enough about our planet’s future to make difficult and expensive journeys across the world, leaves us humbled, inspired and empowered to work together for a better future.