Sustainable Office Design - Unlocking Performance & Productivity

OVERVIEW OF SUSTAINABILITY

WHAT'S IN A WORD?

People & Planet

The official, text-book definition of sustainable development (or 'sustainability') suggests holding up the edifice by the three 'pillars' of the environment, the economy and society.

This works in principle and even practice, but isn't an easy trio to digest conceptually, and nor does it readily engage the imagination. Yet sustainability can appeal to our instinctive admiration for systems or solutions that dazzle with their elegant response to complexity. The UK government, recognising that the standard language didn't have people begging for more, came up with a warmer definition most people can relate to.

The essence, then, is to bring about a mode of living and working that allows humanity to flourish in a flourishing natural environment, that irons out inequities between countries and regions, without compromising future flourishing. It 'converges human and natural flourishing so they work for rather than against one other over the long term'.

“At the heart of sustainable development is the simple idea of ensuring a better quality of life for everyone, now and for generations to come.”

UK Government, Strategy for Sustainable Development, 1999

Planet & Poverty

The midwife of 'sustainable development' was a collective realisation that we couldn't keep living as we were, 'borrowing' resources from poorer regions and future generations. The tipping point in terms of sustainability came recently, when we crossed a line from living within our ecological means to overspending accumulated natural capital and even selling off the family silver. In the 1960s we were at about 70% of carrying capacity (the human footprint the earth can bear without potentially triggering irreversible consequences). The US National Academy of Sciences has confirmed that we are now at about 120%. Do the maths.

“The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, drawing on about 1,400 experts in 95 countries, has found that ecosystems have been changed more in the last 50 years by human activity than at any comparable time in history. About two thirds of the ecosystems they looked at were degraded or being used unsustainably, and 0.5% of natural habitats are being lost each year, mostly to farmland.”

http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx

The warp and woof of weaving towards sustainability (it isn't a straight path) is to simultaneously bring our collective overspend back within ecological, biodiversified budget, adapting to or repairing damage already done, while addressing inequities which mean that roughly 20% of the world's population consumes 80% of resources.

Balancing The Budget

Tipping the budget into credit, buildings can already be designed that are not merely 90% less resource consuming, but which can be net producers of energy and clean air, feeding their surplus energy into the communal grid.

Government Responses

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the clunkily acronymed UNFCCC) was signed in 1992 and provides a non-binding target to stabilise global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). The Convention established a yearly Conference of Parties, the so-called COP.

The Kyoto Protocol adopted in 1997 provides targets for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2008-2012 against a 1990 baseline year. International negotiations are now underway to come up with a new framework to succeed Kyoto when the Protocol expires in 2012.

Kyoto also allows for 'flexible mechanisms' such as the Clean Development Mechanism whereby developed countries gain 'credits' for investing in carbon-reducing projects in developing countries. Such market mechanisms have been adopted by the EU through its Emissions Trading Scheme, launched in 2005.

The UNFCCC has a sister convention, the UN Convention on Biodiversity (UN CBD), which also has Conference of Parties (COP) meetings. The CBD COP 10, in Nagoya in October 2010, will see the results of the G8 sponsored initiative, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), putting some big (scary) numbers on the economic costs of biodiversity loss. Watch this space, ecosystems and biodiversity issues are likely to head into the same common parlance space that climate change now occupies.

Fun with Factoids

• The UN Development Programme estimates that if the whole world were to have a similar lifestyle to that of developed countries today, it would need the resources of 5.5 earth planets.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that an increase in average temperatures of 2-4 degrees will bring more extreme weather events, leading to sea level rises and threatening sensitive ecosystems such as coral reefs.
• There is 10,000,000 km3 of water stored in underground aquifers. Since 1950 there has been a rapid expansion of groundwater exploitation providing 50% of all drinking water, 40% of industrial water and 20% of irrigation water.

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