Building with biodiversity in mind

The construction industry needs to look beyond carbon if it wants to be truly climate-positive

We’ve had the built environment on our minds over the past few weeks and the intersection between the need to build homes for a growing global population and the impact construction has on the natural world. UN-Habitat estimates that by 2030, 40 per cent of the global population – around three billion people – will need access to adequate housing. This translates into demand for a staggering 96,000 new housing units every day.

We’ve got some insights to share with you from the recent Innovation Zero conference in London on this topic – applicable to firms around the world, not just UK-specific – but before we do, we wanted to give you a heads up that there are more than 1,000 property and construction innovation case studies in the Springwise Library. And with biodiversity disclosure on the horizon for companies across industry, we’ll be zeroing in on innovation to inspire your thinking around assessing the risks and opportunities presented by biodiversity conservation in the coming weeks.

So, back to Innovation Zero. The ‘Roadmap to Energy Efficiency and Biodiversity’ panel, didn’t pull any punches. According to Smith Mordak, Chief Executive at the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), the industry has “carbon tunnel vision”, but the biodiversity crisis is interconnected. In their view, we should be measuring the embodied ecological impact in the same way that we can measure embodied carbon. Using a certain material or resource may have huge biodiversity impacts along the way and we “aren’t connecting the dots yet”, because these impacts are felt off-site, potentially on the other side of the world. Ironically, sometimes decarbonisation decisions may actually have an adverse effect on biodiversity if you look more deeply – “The years that it takes for ecosystems to regenerate could be a lot longer than the life of the building you’re constructing.”

The UKGBC has created an Embodied Ecological Impacts Task Group to take a more holistic approach to measuring the impact of the built environment in the UK, which is proving to be a leader in policy innovation. The Biodiversity Net Gain requirement came into effect in the UK on 12 February for large developments and from 2 April for small sites, which means that all planning applications will be required to demonstrate that they will compensate for any loss of biodiversity, contributing to a 10 per cent uptick in biodiversity on site or offsite for a minimum of 30 years.

Elsewhere in the world, the focus has indeed been on carbon reduction, with biodiversity coming a poor second, if at all. When Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) more than a decade ago, it was trumpeted as an economic boon for low- to middle-income countries in Southeast Asia and beyond. The scheme has faced criticism from its inception due to the debt burden placed on countries struggling to pay or the lack of local employment opportunities produced. However, it’s only been in recent years that the potential biodiversity impact of the network of infrastructure megaprojects such as roads, expressways, high-speed rails, pipelines, ports and power plants, that comprise the initiative, has been discussed. A key concern for conservation is which BRI corridors overlap with biodiversity hotspots across Asia.

Innovators are coming up with solutions but the key is to use them at scale and for large companies with the means – and increasingly the requirement – to bake biodiversity mitigation into the construction process from the beginning. For more on what can be done, check out the Springwise Library.