Mr. Pat Barry:

The Irish Green Building Council is working in co-operation with the industry and key stakeholders to develop a roadmap to decarbonise Ireland’s built environment. For the first time, we have tried to capture the total environmental impact of construction and the built environment across its whole life cycle. This work, done in close co-operation with University College Dublin, UCD, shows that emissions associated with construction and the built environment add up to 37% of our national CO emissions. This comprises 23% operational emissions associated with the energy we use to heat, cool and light our buildings, while a further 14% of the emissions are embodied carbon emissions from the production of construction materials, the transport of materials, the construction process and the maintenance, repair and disposal of buildings and infrastructure.

The introduction of the nearly zero energy building standard for new build and the new national retrofit scheme will lead to reductions in the CO emissions due to the operation of buildings, but the regulations need to be strengthened. While we welcome the certainty provided by the new national retrofit scheme, retrofits must be made easier and more affordable. Homeowners do not know what to do or where to start and need fully independent energy renovation advisers to support them on their journey and the first step is to develop a building renovation passport to plan a high-quality staged retrofit. If the information within these passports is captured centrally, they could also support project aggregation and materials aggregation, hence reducing costs.

Under our current building regulations, there is no requirement for the measurement of carbon emissions in construction beyond that associated with operational energy. The ambitious construction and renovation programmes for housing and infrastructure to cater for an expanding population over the coming 20 years could lead to significant carbon emissions if embodied carbon is not taken into account. There is a risk we will blow the construction and built environment carbon budget if we do not address embodied carbon emissions. The impact of all new buildings and infrastructure should be measured immediately at a project level within public procurement. The public spending code should be updated to ensure carbon is fully accounted for in construction and infrastructure spending plans.

To provide certainty to the industry, a clear timeline should be published on the introduction of regulations on embodied carbon. This should start with the requirement to measure and disclose before 2025. The data gathered through disclosure should then allow for the setting of project-specific carbon limits by 2027. This will improve the knowledge of the industry, stimulate action for carbon reduction and spark innovation in products and services.

Several concerted actions are needed to reduce the embodied carbon emissions associated with the built environment. First, we must value existing buildings and avoid throwing away the embodied carbon and resources within them by discouraging demolition through the planning system.

We must reuse existing buildings and bring as much vacant property back into use as possible in order to minimise the need for new construction. For new buildings, we must encourage better design and more efficient use of materials. Addressing embodied carbon emissions can address construction cost by saving on wasted or excessive material use.

Materials used in construction must be low impact. This means encouraging the use of reused and recycled materials to transition to circular construction. Government has a role to play in removing the barriers to reuse of materials. Ireland’s climate is ideally suited and has great potential to provide bio-based construction materials, from timber to rapidly renewable fibres such as hemp. Bio-based materials require lower CO2 emissions to produce and they also sequester carbon. Only 24% of newly constructed homes in Ireland are timber frame compared with 75% in Scotland. We need to support new local forestry and agriculture related industries to supply the construction sector. Forestry licensing must be reformed to increase levels of planting. Building regulations need to facilitate the use of low-carbon technologies and products, enabling the use of timber at scale without compromising safety or quality. Existing construction industries such as concrete and cement must be decarbonised.

We would like to highlight once again that addressing whole-life carbon emissions in the built environment is critical to achieving our 2030 targets. Embodied carbon is a major gap in carbon policy in Ireland and therefore we need to start from today to measure and reduce.