Policy challenge

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C requires immediate and drastic reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A significant contributor to anthropogenic global GHG emissions is the production of building materials. Biobased materials offer the potential to reduce such emissions and could be deployed in the short term. Timber construction has received the main attention from policy and industry. However, the implementation of timber construction at the global scale is constrained by the availability of sustainably managed forest supplies.

Until recently, little attention has been paid to the carbon impacts of the construction and refurbishing of buildings, with the majority of focus on their operational performance. Yet our buildings are constructed using materials, components, and products. These materials have to be extracted from the ground or grown, transported to a facility for processing, transported again to be transformed into a product, and finally transported to a construction site.

This book intends to clarify the concept of Sustainable Buildings and Construction (SBC) in Africa. It is based on primarily African research and building projects implemented in different parts of the region. The publication is meant to be read by real estate developers, building industry professionals, researchers, planners and policy makers, and users of buildings.

Construction projects using emerging bio-based materials have been realized over the past ten to fifteen years within Europe. Bio-based buildings utilize properties of natural materials to regulate internal environments, particularly fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity. Despite individual exemplar projects demonstrating functional performance and long-term operational cost savings, there hasn’t been a proliferation of commercial or domestic bio-based projects.

Some Finnish buildings could cut their carbon footprints by as much as 43% – according to research conducted by One Click LCA for the Finnish government – and almost all could make a saving of 28% using easily available decarbonisation strategies.

Channel Projects, an architecture studio, sought to develop a solution that would encourage steel reuse in the construction industry, in order to tackle the material’s significant contribution to global carbon emissions.

With support from ReLondon’s business transformation team and the Mayor of London’s Green New Deal fund, Channel Projects was able to further develop its “ReFrame” industrial building concept and business model.

The UK Government’s recent climate change legislation and the ambitious carbon targets from funders and end users, are encouraging developers and their design teams to look at exactly where carbon is contained within construction projects and where it can be reduced.  

Aluminium - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.

The use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) to replace part of the clinker in cement is the most successful strategy to reduce CO2 emissions in the global cement industry. However, limited supplies of conventional SCMs make it difficult to take this strategy further unless new types of SCMs become available.

The only type of material available in the quantities needed to meet demand is clay containing kaolinite, which can be calcined to produce an effective SCM. Such clays are widely available in countries where most growth in demand for cement is forecast.

The glass industry is part of the energy-intensive industry posing a major challenge to fulfill the CO₂ reduction targets of the Paris Climate Agreement. The segments of the glass industry, e.g., container or flat glass, are quite diverse and attribute to different glass products with different requirements to product quality and various process options.