Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 26 April 2022
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action
New Retrofitting Plan and the Built Environment: Discussion
Dr. Oliver Kinnane:
With regard to the first question on Housing for All, the projection is that if we build 400,000 homes, there will be an embodied carbon cost of somewhere between 4 megatonnes and 6 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent, based on the current carbon intensity of construction. If we were to move to a less carbon-intensive model and move from predominantly masonry construction to, say, timber construction, we could reduce that bill quite considerably. However, it is a lot of construction and it will come with a high embodied carbon bill.