Mr. Pat Barry:

Our carbon emissions are divided up into sectors, and those are reported according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change format. They are broken down into: buildings, which only covers operational carbon; electricity production; waste; land use; and industrial. What has been missed is that under industrial emissions, a very large chunk of those emissions relates to buildings, another chunk of transport emissions relates to buildings and a chunk of waste emissions also relates to buildings. What has been missed is that these are all connected to form embodied carbon, and construction has not been regarded as a separate sector. This is what has happened. Under the climate action plan, there has been a lot of focus on each sector in isolation and not enough in seeing how they are connected. Consider a random example such as transport or minimum car parking requirements. In urban or similar areas, the minimum car parking requirements can be such that one would have to build an entire underground car park. We are talking about 25 tonnes of carbon to build that underground car parking space. We are not seeing the connections between everything. When we start to connect up transport, transport infrastructure, buildings and building infrastructure, waste, the excess use of materials and industry, we get a much more rounded picture and we can actually tackle carbon in a much more effective way, rather than trying to hand over a bit to the Department of Transport and another to the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. We need to have a lot more conversations between Departments.