Low Carbon Building - Essay Example

?Running Head: Low Carbon Building Low Carbon Building [Institute’s Low Carbon Building There are studies, which suggest that, within the next couple of decades, the overall risks and costs associated with climate change could force the world to lose as much as 5 percent of the GDP every year. Furthermore, if not tackled properly, this figure could escalate to 20 percent, as well. Research suggests that buildings, both residential and commercial, are responsible for more than 38 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, a figure which has increased rapidly in the recent decades and has the potential to escalate further. In fact, research conducted by Isiadinso et al (2011) indicates that this figure reaches the level of 50 percent for UK buildings. However, this is also the area where most room is available to decrease GHG emissions. In fact, it was the landmark research conducted by Pacala & Socolow (2004), which identified building efficiency as one of the “stabilization wedges” that could assist in ensuring that carbon emissions could be offset by the year 2050. Over the past few years, experts, scholars and researchers have highlighted the crucial role that construction professionals can play through designing and structuring the buildings, in the first place, as efficient and sustainable as they can be, through space heating, cooling and hot water, lighting and others. As the name suggests, low carbon buildings refer to buildings that are planned and structured in such a way that the carbon emission could be minimised, however, the fact is that, amongst many scholars and experts, there is an ongoing debate between scholars and experts regarding various dimensions of low carbon buildings. In fact, experts even disagree over the definition of a zero carbon or low carbon building and if the same is achievable or not. Williams (2010) takes the liberty of drawing of highlighting the pivotal differences between conventional houses and low impact environment building or autonomous building or PassivHaus design buildings. Where conventional buildings are dependent on the main drainage systems and gas supplies, low impact environmental buildings have independent waste disposal systems and energy services. Conventional buildings do not face any obligation to incorporate renewable energy source installation and energy generation from that source during early stages of design, however, low impact environmental buildings have to ensure that they do the integrate a renewable energy source within the design of the building and that also in the early phases of the design. In case of conventional buildings, the requirement for space heating is fulfilled through gas or electric heating systems, but in the case of low carbon buildings, the dependence on gas or electric heating systems for space heating has to be reduced by at least 90 percent. Furthermore, the total amount of energy consumed in the process of space heating typically exceeds the mark of 15 kWh/m2. However, in the case of low carbon buildings, experts agree that this number cannot exceed the 15kwh/m2 mark. Vale and Vale (2002) are amongst the list of scholars and experts that have indirect critiqued the idea and concept of low carbon buildings. They believe that buildings do not have the responsibility to exhibit sustainable and environmentally responsible behaviour but people have this moral and ethical responsibility. Therefore, it is not necessary or imperative to create building with low carbon, green or sustainable design but people should mould and alter their lifestyle choices in such a way that their actions generate lesser carbons emissions. A conventional house will have much lesser carbon emissions than a low carbon house, if the people living within that the building are to make sustainable lifestyle choices (p. 485). Ramus & Montiel (2005) highlighting some of the problems associated with the low carbon buildings identified that in many cases, ashamed of their carbon emissions data, most architects disown or hide it. However, the same only compounds the problem. The real carbon emissions can only be obtained after the building has been occupied for two years. Therefore, the data which architects provide is only predicted based on their calculations of its use and capacity. After two years, most architects have already moved on to next projects, therefore, their focus should be on accepting the real emissions data as the feedback and use the same to improve their upcoming designs (p. 85). Fuerst, et al. (2011) conducted an interesting research which highlights one of the major issues with this area of study. The goal of the study was to explore and analyse the data regarding the green buildings within UK with focus on their environmental characteristics, financial performance, energy consumption and other physical characteristics. The study, initially, aimed at running a regression or any other statistical analysis to understand any causation, correlation or cause and effect relation amongst these factors. However, as the study went on, it realised that much of the data regarding low carbon houses within UK remains in the hand of the public sector of UK. Although, the study was able to conduct 11 semi-structured interviews, making this study an explorative one, it found out that the data regarding these houses is scattered across various departments and institutions within the public sector and it would require extensive number of work hours to formulate the required links within the data. The government itself has not taken the responsibility to formulate these links and gather the data because it can maximise its revenues by the commercial exploitation of the data. The interviews that were conducted, therefore, are largely from the private sector and client driven. Furthermore, as by product of the research, the study did come up with an interesting finding indicating that, within the property market of low carbon houses, pricing is the central concern of users as opposed to the ability of the homes to generate lesser carbon. Miller (2009); however, is able to conduct a research with over 700 tenants living in 154 different green Energy Star labelled buildings managed by the CBRE belonging from a major real estate portfolio. The research made an attempt to explore the views and perceptions of tenants regarding the energy costs, productivity and energy impacts. The findings revealed that low carbon buildings and green lifestyles was given a significant degree of importance by the tenants and did they report an increase in productivity and decrease in the energy costs. However, it appeared that the overall operating costs did not differ as compared to their peers living in the conventional buildings. Nevertheless, the same was due to the fact that these people had moved into these buildings and the operating expenses in these buildings decrease over a longer period. Important here to note is that this points out one of the one most important debate in this field where the opponents of the green and low carbon building point out statistics which show that the initial costs of getting a home with a low carbon building are much higher than getting a home within a conventional building. The fact is that in many cases, this is true. Many high efficiency appliances and lighting are difficult to find and thus more expensive. Furthermore, the process involved in the certification of these buildings is also more time consuming and expensive thus further increasing the costs. However, the proponents of low carbon buildings argue that in the long term, many of the operational costs associated with housing decrease; therefore, the initial high costs should be seen as an investment. Klotz et al. (2009) focus on other issues associated with building low carbon houses and that is the issues of high costs, which discourage people from buying and in turn, constructors from constructing and designers from designing these houses. The research acknowledges that the construction and operations of building represents over 33 percent of worldwide energy flows and experts and policymakers over the world agree that the solution to this problem lies in ensuring the construction and widespread use of low carbon homes. However, when it comes to delivering sustainable and low carbon homes, the stakeholders go through a complex and unfamiliar process, which causes huge discouragement. The research, with a case study and though experiment method comes to the conclusion that the prime reason behind the same is the lack of communication, coordination, lack of alignment of objectives and goals amongst the different stakeholders involved in the process such as the owners, designers and constructors. The study concluded that substantial cost savings are easily possible through a transparent process delivery. In this case, the researchers have viewed the chain of stakeholders in the same manner in which, businesses view their supply chain management. Any organisation can incur substantial losses if communication is not facilitated between different players within the supply chain. In fact, lack of communication can even lead to a bullwhip effect, which refers to the preference of members within the supply chain to keep an inventory that is greater than the predicted demand of their customer in order to ensure any surprises. However, as one goes deeper in the supply chain, this safety stock increases and the original supplier might find himself producing much more than what the final customer would demand thus leading to waste and losses. This is applicable to this case of low carbon building because lack of communication amongst the stakeholders creates distorted perceptions of the expectations of other stakeholders, which not only increases costs but also increases dissatisfaction. When most of the literature in the field of sustainable, green and low environment impact buildings and structures is concentrated on residential buildings, Roper & Beard (2006) come up with interesting evidence about how sustainable and low carbon buildings in the industrial and business environment could assist organisations. They believe that not only these buildings would decrease pollution, but at the same time, they would also decrease the costs of operating and maintaining these buildings over a longer period of time. Furthermore, the researchers believe that as we move further in the 20th century, the pressures on businesses and organisations to make their operations more sustainable and green would increase rapidly. Consumers of the 21st century realise that they can exercise their bargaining power to dictate their terms over the producers and sellers. Many of the environmental groups, civil society, NGOs, consumer watchdogs and policymakers have used this bargaining power to dictate their terms of sustainable and greener operations. Responding to this challenge, many organisations now strive to associate themselves with an environmental friendly and green record. However, Roper and Beard (2006) believe that the best way to start is not by creating greener products or by donating to environmentally friendly causes, but through renovating and creating office buildings, franchises, stores, warehouses and other fixed assets of the company low carbon buildings. The same would allow the company to gain the most trust from the side of consumers that are concerned about the environment to show that the company also cares about issues such as global warming and climate change. Grady et al. (2010) conducted a research on exploring the impact of green and low carbon buildings within industrial and commercial settings on employee health and productivity. The research focused on 175 different respondents from three different business organisations and allowed them to report their absences, health related leaves, work hours and productivity. The indoor work environment was measured and evaluated across seven important dimensions of indoor air quality, temperature, humidity, ventilation, acoustics, ergonomic design and safety, and lighting. The research ended up concluding that indoor work environment has a pivotal and crucial impact over the employee health and safety, which in turn contributes to employee productivity and satisfaction. Although, the evidence presented by the research does appear to be theoretically correct and strong since many other empirical studies have presented similar findings, the study fails to explain how the rate of absenteeism, perceived stress, and sick leaves “decreased” with the change of office building. There is no theoretical or empirical evidence, which could prove that low carbon building could actually cure diseases. The only evidence available points out that low carbon buildings have the capacity to prevent the same. Furthermore, the findings of the research are derived from the surveys completed by the employees themselves, which means that halo effect would have played its part and results would have been concluded based in the perceptions of the employees. Teemusk & Mander (2009), with the help of their experiment, made a significant contribution to the field. Their research studies a green roof from June 10, 2004 to April 25, 2005. This green roof was built in March 2003 in Estonia. Furthermore, in order to avoid any errors, temperatures were measured within the intervals of 15 minutes and the same took place on both the eastern and western side of the roof. The study used statistical analysis with a 0.05 level of significance to reach the conclusion that, green roofs have the potential and capability to decrease temperature fluctuations as compared to bituminous roof surfaces. In the winter, the temperature within the house was similar to the roof because of the snow cover and in the summers, the temperatures of the house remained much lower than that of the outside environment and the roof. This study is just another manifestation of the effectiveness and efficiency of low carbon buildings in decreasing pollution and costs. Sentman et al. (2009) also points out towards the debate of defining the standards, what constitutes a low carbon house, what constitutes a zero carbon house, and what the threshold level is in this regard. The paper believes that in the future, governments will play a more active and imperative role in fighting with climate change and with the passage of time, homeowners, and construction companies will be faced with stricter regulations. In fact, in future, focus of the debate would shift from low carbon buildings to low carbon cities and from low carbon cities to zero carbon cities and maybe from that to negative carbon cities, which, as the name suggests, would suck in the existing carbon in the environment to undo the effects of previous climate change (p. 55). It is not important to agree on the definition or dynamics of low carbon buildings but the real issue here is to acknowledge that we are faced with the problem of climate change and something needs to be done about the same. If we agree on the later problem then the disagreements in the former aspect would not matter much (Miller, 2008, p. 389). References Fuerst, F., McAllister, P., Wetering, J., & Wyatt, P. 2011. “Measuring the financial performance of green buildings in the UK commercial property market: Addressing the data issues.” Journal of Financial Management of Property and Construction, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp.163 – 185. Grady, Sue C., Singh, A., Syal, Matt., Korkmaz, S. 2010. “Effects of Green Buildings on Employee Health and Productivity.” American Journal of Public Health, Published online on July 15, 2010. Isiadinso, C., & Goodhew, S., & Marsh, J., & Hoxley, M. 2011. “Identifying an appropriate approach to judge low carbon buildings.” Structural Survey, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 436 – 446. Klotz, L., Horman, M., Riley, D. & Bechtel, J. 2009. “Process transparency for sustainable building delivery.” International Journal of Sustainable Engineering. Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 298-307. Miller, N. G. 2009. “Do Green Buildings Make Dollars and Sense?” University of San Diego, Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate. Working Paper 9-11. Miller, N. 2008. “Does Green Pay Off?” Journal of Real Estate Portfolio Management, Vol. 14, No. 4, Oct-Dec. pp 385-401. Pacala, S., & R. Socolow. 2004. “Stabilization wedges: solving the climate problem for the next 50 years with current technologies.” Science, Vol. 305, No. 5686, pp. 968–972. Ramus, C. A. and Montiel, I. 2005. “When Are Corporate Environmental Policies a Form of Greenwashing?” Business and Society, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 377-414. Roper, K. O., & Beard, J. L. 2006. “Justifying sustainable buildings – championing green operations.” Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 91 – 103. Teemusk, A., & Mander, U. 2009. “Greenroof potential to reduce temperature fluctuations of a roof membrane: A case study from Estonia.” Building and Environment. Volume 44, pp. 643– 650. Vale, B. & Vale, R. 2002. The New Autonomous House – Design and Planning for Sustainability, Thames and Hudson, London. Williams, C. 2010. Biodiversity for Low and Zero Carbon Buildings: A Technical Guide for New Build, RIBA Publishing, London. Sentman, S. D., Percio, S. T. D., & Koerner. P. A. 2008. “Climate for Change: Green Building Policies, Programs, and Incentives.” Journal of Green Building. Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 46-64. Annotated Bibliography Isiadinso, C., & Goodhew, S., & Marsh, J., & Hoxley, M. 2011. “Identifying an appropriate approach to judge low carbon buildings.” Structural Survey, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 436 – 446. The paper, written by well known academicians in the field of sustainable design and structural engineering within the UK, makes an attempt to not only summarise and report the literature available regarding the subject but also conducts research to highlight the best practices regarding evaluating low carbon buildings. The research used a mixed methodology, where an online survey and an interview with 13 experts were conducted. Although, the interviews were conducted with 13 notable experts in the field, the study does not mention any steps taken towards decreasing the subjectivity and researcher bias that must have played their role. On the other hand, questions can be raised over the use of an online survey because the data coming from the same not only lacks credibility but verifiability, as well. The study does not mention a sampling method; one can assume that the method would be simple random sampling and that also without a pre defined target population. Furthermore, the research also lacks generalisability. This is because of the fact that the study is too much focused on the UK and the Midland region. The researchers, respondents and most of the literature is from the UK; thus, raising doubts about it generalisability. The study ends up concluding that the current criterion used to evaluate low carbon buildings is complicated and there is a need for a simpler method for evaluation. Moreover, the research concludes that there is a need for a prudent architecture award system that could highlight the best practices in the design and structure of low carbon buildings. Roper, K. O., & Beard, J. L. 2006. “Justifying sustainable buildings – championing green operations." Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 91 – 103. The authors of this article, who are from Georgia and Columbia, USA, respectively, command an appreciable degree of respect in the academic circles for their work in this field. The paper takes up a stimulating and rather less researched and explored dimension concerning the field of sustainable buildings. When many other researchers have focused their attention towards residential buildings, this paper focuses on sustainable industrial or business building and makes an implicit attempt to convince business organisations that sustainable and low carbon buildings can help them improve their image amongst customers, improve financial gains and use their resource effectively and efficiently. The research makes a fascinating point that organisations, rather than spending their energies towards creating sustainable product lines, should divert their focus towards adds this low carbon and sustainability dimension to their fixed assets such as their buildings, which will manifest that they are actually committed to saving the environment. Nevertheless, this article does not directly add anything concrete to the already available literature, primarily because of the fact that it does not undertake any primary research. A more comprehensive and prudent approach would have been to conduct an empirical analysis by comparing organisations with sustainable buildings with those that are conducting their operations in conventional buildings. Interviews, focus groups, questionnaires or even secondary data would have then assisted in understanding the quantitative impact of the same on the perceptions of the customers regarding the environmental friendliness of the company and the financial gains or losses that it is making due to the type of building. Rather this paper studies, cites and takes examples from the sustainability movement in the US to deduce the key findings of the research. Teemusk, A., & Mander, U. 2009. “Greenroof potential to reduce temperature fluctuations of a roof membrane: A case study from Estonia.” Building and Environment, Vol. 44, pp. 643– 650. This paper makes a valuable contribution to the field of low carbon buildings by providing empirical evidence, which points the ability of green roofs to protect the houses from extreme temperatures. Unlike other studies, this research comes forward with solid evidence, statistical analysis and hard data to back the conclusions with facts and findings. One possible objection to this research study could be rooted in not using a double controlled study, similar to what is done within medical circles. What appears to be the ability of the green roof to stabilise the temperature in different seasons could very easily be the result of other factors within the house or the nearby environment. One might argue that what the study found is a strong correlation but not causation, something that the study has been implying. In order to prove a strong cause and effect relationship, the study will not have to expand the sample but also prove that other factors such as the house structure, environment, surrounding areas and others did not impact the temperatures within the house. Therefore, an ideal research would have ensured that other green roofs are placed on different houses, made of different materials and present in different regions or temperature zones so that the study could prove that these factors had nothing to do with the results. The same would have allowed the study to strongly conclude causation or a cause and effect relationship. Another possible critique on the study can be made on its sole focus on the Estonia which belongs to a particular temperate zone. In order for this study to be labelled as more reliable and valid, similar experiments will have to be conducted in different temperate zones in other parts of the world, as well. Miller, N. G. 2009. “Do Green Buildings Make Dollars and Sense?” University of San Diego, Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate. Working Paper 9-11. Based on his experience and research, Miller concludes that green and low carbon buildings are no longer a niche market, but they are the future of doing business. People who view low carbon buildings and green lifestyles as a fade are deeply mistaken because currently, we are living in the era of conversion. Miller’s research focuses an intriguing aspect of low carbon buildings and that is focused on whether or not these buildings have the ability to make dollars and more importantly, does their existence makes sense. Based on a large survey conducted with over 700 tenants, the research is able to conclude that it not only makes sense but it also makes dollars or at least saves dollars. Amongst a long list of findings, the most pertinent findings reveal that people shifting from conventional to low carbon building reported lesser sick leaves, absenteeism, lower operating costs, higher productivity and others. Nevertheless, the problem in this case is the self-reporting structure of the data collection process, which used a questionnaire filled by the respondents. Therefore, if the study reveals that the respondents feel that they are more productive at work due to living in these new homes, then it is highly likely that it is due to the halo effect. Respondents must be feeling good about shifting to their new low carbon homes that they might be projecting that feeling onto every aspect of their life and associating everything good happening around them with the shifting of houses. Sentman, S. D., Percio, S. T. D., & Koerner. P. A. 2008. “Climate for Change: Green Building Policies, Programs, and Incentives.” Journal of Green Building. Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 46-64. This paper attempts to reinforce the idea in the hearts and minds of the people that climate change is not a myth or conspiracy or green housing is not a fad but it is highly likely to continue within the next few decades. As the world becomes more interconnected, as more and people get access to education and start understanding what is happening on the globe, more and more people would line up to protect this planet any possible danger or threat. One possible loophole within the paper could be the fact that it places too much importance on the shoulders of federal, state, and local governments, not only in the United States, but also all over the world to ensure that the GHG emissions are under control and the society is moving towards environment friendly. However, the problem with such an approach, based on pure government intervention and force is that it is highly unlikely to be sustainable. Rather than intervening in the market, which would require billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, the government should try to facilitate the process of development of new technologies and processes that are cheaper and better so that people prefer them instead of other technologies and products available in the market. Any change that would come with the help of the people and the market forces is likely to be sustainable. Read More