Architects in Britain recently announced huge moves addressing climate change that parallel the initiatives underway here. There is an exciting convergence between efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, enabled, in part, by a heightened level of collaboration between members of both the AIA and RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects).
In June, soon after the AIA passing its resolution calling for architects to take urgent action to address climate change, the RIBA board of trustees agreed to join the global declaration of a climate emergency, committing to implementing an action plan proposed by their Ethics and Sustainable Development Commission to meet the UK government’s pledge to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Then, in early October, they announced the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge, which aggressive goals for operational energy use and embodied carbon of construction, with goals that become progressively more stringent in 2025 and then 2030. Like the AIA 2030 Commitment, the target is to achieve net zero operational carbon (through a combination of efficient building envelope, mechanical systems, and onsite and offsite renewable energy). To this, they add specific goals to reduce embodied carbon of construction to less than half of current values in just ten years.
Until this announcement, RIBA had no counterpart to the AIA 2030 Commitment. With this announcement, they have matched our efforts and gone one better, by incorporating tracking and targets for the up-front emissions associated with construction. This new effort has been led by RIBA’s counterpart to COTE, the Sustainable Futures Group. The development of this portfolio-wide approach was bolstered through a series of conversations between RIBA members, AIA members based in London, members of the AIA COTE, and members of a panel established to advance sustainability initiatives among architectural organizations, the UIA Sustainable Development Goals Commission. These conversations took place through a series of face-to-face meetings and videocalls that began last year.
As with the AIA resolution on climate change, this is an initiative that has come from the bottom up, but is now endorsed and embraced by the boards. In fact, RIBA has announced these initiatives while just getting started on developing the supporting infrastructure analogous to the AIA 2030 Dynamic Data Exchange (DDx). This infrastructure will be rolled out over the next few months.
For now, the 2030 Climate Challenge is voluntary. However, its developers say that the intention is to make it mandatory for all RIBA members within a few years. For now, one large inducement is that the criteria for the highest design awards is shifting towards requiring compliance with the 2030 Climate Challenge. This was kicked off last week when one of the highest design awards in Britain, the Stirling Prize, was given not to a shiny glass box but an affordable housing project meeting PassiveHouse standards. Gary Clark, chair of RIBA’s Sustainable Futures Group, observed, “This is huge. Some suggested that we ought to create a separate award for sustainability, but we held fast saying that sustainable design has to be a requirement for consideration for any design award. This will get people’s attention and shift the conversation on design excellence.”
To learn more about what RIBA is doing to promote climate action in the build environment, click here >