CGTN Europe spoke to Lord Adair Turner, Chair, Energy Transitions Commission
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00:00The homes we live in, the shops we spend money in, and the offices that we work in
00:05are all heavily responsible for climate change, from how they're built to how they're used.
00:12The world's buildings altogether make up around one third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
00:19But as construction around the world increases, that figure is going to rise.
00:24This is according to a report by the Energy Transitions Commission.
00:29Within the next 25 years, the amount of landmass occupied by buildings is likely to expand by 55%,
00:37and that'll mean emissions will also grow significantly if building methods stay the same.
00:43But switching to less carbon-intensive materials and greener sources of energy could potentially halve those emissions.
00:52Lord Adair Turner is chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, who produced the report,
00:58and he joins us now. Thank you very much for your time.
01:01Your report details three key priorities for buildings.
01:05Replace fossil fuels, create more energy efficiency, and build green.
01:10How far along is the construction industry in achieving those goals?
01:17Well, I think it's a hugely mixed picture across the world, and one of the challenges is, you know,
01:23when we talk about the steel industry or the automotive industry, you can identify the 50 companies that really matter in the world.
01:31Construction is hugely diverse, lots of big companies, lots of small companies,
01:37all the way down to really small ones, different in different countries.
01:40And that's one of the challenges.
01:42However, we can clearly set out some general principles of what we should be trying to achieve.
01:48We should be designing buildings as much as possible, which are electrified, taking fossil fuel heating out.
01:55We should be driving towards more efficient air conditioning systems.
02:01We should be trying to use in the construction of buildings zero-carbon cement and zero-carbon steel, both of which are possible.
02:10Now, implementing it is, in a sense, a very complicated thing, in some ways more complicated than decarbonizing the global shipping industry,
02:19because, again, take global shipping.
02:21You could get the 10 big container shipping companies in the world and talk about what they're going to do, and you'd have a lot of the answer.
02:28It's not like that in buildings, but in this report, we set out the principles of what we have to achieve,
02:34which can guide individual governments in driving towards zero-carbon buildings, both when they're being operated and when they're being built.
02:44Is it still more expensive to build green?
02:49No, not necessarily.
02:52Often we find that if you talk about the embodied emissions, the emissions up front,
02:59often there is quite unnecessary amounts of concrete or materials go into a building simply because it hasn't been specified in an efficient fashion.
03:10There are some other situations where if you want to achieve better levels, for instance, of insulation,
03:17and insulation is a very, very important element of getting more energy-efficient buildings, you do have to spend some more up front.
03:25So there are things that we can do which actually reduce the cost of buildings.
03:29There are other things that we need to do where there is some up front expenditure,
03:34but then there's big benefits, not only of reduced emissions, but of reduced operating costs.
03:39And, by the way, there are some extraordinary easy wins.
03:42If you just took a lot of buildings in the hot, low-latitude countries of the world where global warming is going to be a major problem
03:51and painted all the roofs white so that they reflect the sunshine,
03:56you will actually reduce the energy requirements and the energy cost which people have to put into, for instance, air conditioning.
04:04How much is politics at play here?
04:06We've seen Donald Trump pushing his tariffs.
04:09We've also seen his administration pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
04:15Is that political positioning likely to impact negatively the aims of building more green?
04:23Well, I don't think it has a direct impact on building more green specifically.
04:29It has a negative impact on the whole progress towards zero-carbon economy across the world.
04:37It will be a setback to the post-Paris climate process,
04:44which is expressed in what are called the COPs, the Conference of the Parties, each year,
04:49to which China and Europe, the U.K. and India and all the other major countries of the world have been and will continue to be members.
04:57It's at those COPs, the latest bombers of Baku in Azerbaijan, one before that,
05:02very important one at UAE in the Middle East, where the world agrees the general direction of change,
05:08like more renewables, moving beyond fossil fuels.
05:14And it will be a setback to have the U.S. not there.
05:17But I think that means we have to intensify the degree of cooperation between all the other major countries which still are there,
05:24Brazil and Indonesia, India, Europe, the U.K. and China.
05:30It is going to be very important that we work together to maintain momentum.
05:35Thank you so much, Lord Adair Turner, Chair of the Energy Transitions Commission.