"I’ve been polluting the planet for years. I’m not an oil exec—I’m an architect"

By M. Walker

I wanted to take a moment to share with you a fantastic article about the Architect's role in curbing climate change, written by Stephanie Carlisle of KieranTimberlake (btw they created the Tally plugin for Revit, which is a great LCA tool). Her piece is thoughtful, timely, and very insightful. I've compiled a couple of quotes here for digest, but I highly recommend the read. 

“We have 10 years to radically decarbonize the building industry. Think hard about what that really means. We have a decade to fundamentally reshape our global economy. Fifteen years ago, we needed exemplary projects, to build capacity in our industry, to increase carbon literacy, to educate our clients. We needed case studies to show that net zero-carbon projects were possible. I’m sorry to say that we’ve basically squandered those years. Now, we need every project to dramatically reduce emissions if we are to stand a chance of meeting global carbon goals and averting the catastrophic effects of a 2º future.”

“So, what is the role of the designer in tackling carbon emissions? The goal is not to transform architectural design into an act of analysis. The real work now is to figure out how to make carbon assessments part of ethical and inspired design practice. The practice of architecture is already overburdened with modeling and simulation, with litigation, and with cost-cutting. However, I would urge every designer to consider that by failing to connect your concern over climate change to the impact of your day-to-day work, you are already expressing your values. You’re already saying that this is an issue that you don’t really care about at all. Climate change cannot simply be an issue we talk about only when it is convenient.”

Snapshot from Tally

I am, as I'm sure many of you are as well, very interested to see how the next 10 years will play out across the country as the AEC industry begins to reconcile with its need for sustainable design and high performance outcomes. But even if the largest firms in the country didn't care about the physical realities of climate change at all, there's still a strong business case to be made for implementing sustainable practices. The investment markets have already signaled they're taking climate risk into account (i.e. BlackRock just instituted a company-wide climate risk adjustment/divestment for all $7 Trillion in its portfolios) so it's only a matter of time before we see this manifest in the building markets. Real estate tends to follow financial services trends and one of the most major players in finance just started talking about a new language of accounting for their clients' investments that calculates the climate impact of an asset. 

Those who are ahead of the curve are already there. The question now is who will get left behind.