Firstly, national and local assessment standards and performance-based building codes, standards and certifications should ensure that all new construction and major retrofit projects and building operations minimize energy, water use and waste production, and that buildings are treated as future “mines” for construction materials to recycle their embodied carbon. For energy, for example, standards could require projects to put energy back into the grid or use energy offsets from renewable energy when location, climate or building type make self-sufficiency unfeasible (Thomas, Menassa and Kamat 2018). Standards can also set ambitious criteria to minimize water use, municipal waste and building debris, especially in low- income peripheral neighbourhoods and countries that are recipients of debris (dumped or shipped) (Tauhid and Azwani 2018; Duan et al. 2019; Bao and Lu 2020; Lederer et al. 2020; Ram, Kishore and Kalidindi 2020). Designing new buildings so that they are easily disassembled and reusable and using buildings that will be demolished as storehouses of value and utility in future construction can move the building sector towards a closed-loop model (Arora et al. 2020).


Secondly, national and local commitments to retrofit cities to upgrade existing building stock (Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, UNEP and IEA 2020a and 2020b; UNEP 2020b) play an important role in improving energy and water efficiency and reducing waste. Most of the built environment is durable, and older building stock will be in use for decades, if not centuries. Programmes to avoid the construction of less durable buildings through durability standards also play an important role. Similarly, it is vital to ensure that the embodied energy and materials of buildings are used for as long as possible to maximize resource efficiency. While there may be a tension between historic preservation and retrofits


to improve sustainability, historic retrofits are a good way of enhancing environmental sustainability and historic preservation itself is a broader sustainability strategy, since it can avoid much of the carbon intensity of new construction (Delgado Ramos 2019; Foster 2020).


These commitments could ensure that all dwellings – including those in informal settlements or refugee camps – are structurally safe and provide efficient heating, cooling, water and sanitation, and good indoor air quality (ideally free from chemical and microbial contamination). Standards also empower residents to guide the evolution of neighbourhoods towards efficiency goals, while respecting cultural values, practices and patrimony, ensuring that construction and debris do not unfairly burden vulnerable communities.


Transitional, context-sensitive measures are also needed, both to reduce aggregate global energy demand and to correct inequities in energy access and consumption within cities and between cities in the Global North and South. These measures include:


v best-practice life cycle analysis requirements for new construction or retrofitting of individual buildings and multi-building projects;


v use of buildings (and other materials from decommissioned infrastructure) as material banks or “mines”, providing inputs to the circular economy thanks to component parts that are designed to be reused, repurposed or recycled for new projects and fed back into the local economy (Baccini and Brunner 2012; Stegman, Londo and Junginger 2020) (Figure 4.2);


v renewable energy for buildings, including solar, wind, geothermal and microgrids;


Figure 4.2: Maps of retrievable copper (blue-green) in Amsterdam. Such maps can be used to identify sites with urban mining potential.


Source: Waag 2016 Bert Spaan, Marc Kunst 72 GEO for Cities


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