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Cities and climate change

  • October 31, 2021
  • Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
  • Category: DPN Topics
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Cities and climate change

Subject – Environment

Context – low-rise buildings are the future – not skyscrapers

Concept –

  • More than half of the world’s 7.8 billion people live in cities and urban areas. By 2050, an additional 2.5 billion will be living there.
  • More densely packed optimize the use of space and house more people per square metre and limit urban sprawl.
  • However, densely built, low-rise environments are more space and carbon efficient, while high-rise buildings have a drastically higher carbon impact.
  • Operational carbon is generated while a building is in service.
  • Embodied carbon is all the hidden, behind-the-scenes carbon produced during the extraction, production, transport and manufacture of raw materials used to construct a building, plus any produced during maintenance, refurbishment, demolition or replacement.
  • At a global scale, the construction sector is responsible for a significant impact on the environment, as is clear from the graph below.
    • The largest contribution comes from its consumption of energy and resources, which boils down to the design stage — the part of the process that no one is looking at.

  • Passive House designs– a building standard that uses non-mechanical heating and cooling design techniques to lower energy use.
  • Near-zero energy builds– high performance buildings where the low amount of energy required comes mostly from renewable sources.
  • Skyscrapers rely heavily on concrete as a structural material. So the type of materials we use, how much we use, and how we use them is crucial.

  • High-density low-rise cities, such as Paris, are more environmentally friendly than high-density high-rise cities, such as New York.
    • Looking at the fixed population scenarios, when moving from a high-density low-rise to a high-density high-rise urban environment, the average increase in whole life-cycle carbon emissions is 142%.
Cities and climate change Environment

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