We built 23,500 new homes last year and every week sees an increased estimate of how many we need to build to solve our housing crisis. There has been recent consensus of around 50,000-60,000 per annum but that has been trumped by the Labour Party’s policy to build 100,000 homes each year for 10 years.
he reality is that it looks more likely that this year’s completions will actually fall. But a huge issue, which hasn’t received much comment, is that even the existing Housing for All target of 33,000 units cannot be achieved without breaching our climate change goals under the Climate Action Plan 2023.
That is one of the conclusions of the Irish Green Building Council’s (IGBC) report Building a Zero Carbon Ireland. The IGBC is made up of architects, engineers, contractors, universities, professional institutes, local authorities, energy companies and national and multinational firms.
One of the council’s goals is to provide policy input to Government and it commissioned the Building in a Climate Emergency Research Lab at the UCD School of Architecture, to baseline emissions associated with the whole lifecycle of the building stock and infrastructure in Ireland.
They worked with them to model a variety of scenarios based on existing Government policies and potential policies to bring emissions in line by 2030.
The report points out that construction and the built environment sectors account for 37pc of Ireland’s carbon emissions, equalling agriculture. Of these emissions, 23pc come from operating buildings but more than a third comes from the manufacture, transport and installation of building materials themselves – usually referred to as ‘embodied carbon’.
Government policy under the climate act sets a legally binding target of a 51pc reduction in national carbon emissions by 2030 and an overall target of a climate neutral economy by 2050.
Without urgently addressing embodied carbon emissions, the construction and built environment sector will exceed its carbon budget
The research also modelled emissions for a variety of scenarios based on the proposed level of construction and renovation outlined in the National Development Plan, Climate Action Plan and Housing for All policy.
The report concludes that without urgently addressing embodied carbon emissions, the construction and built environment sector will exceed its carbon budget.
Worryingly, none of this takes account of the more recent ramping up of the number of homes we require and it’s clear that unless there is radical change, Ireland cannot meet its climate targets. More positively, the report provides an excellent range of suggestions in a roadmap to decarbonise the built environment.
The Government finds itself with a conundrum and as architect and housing market expert Mel Reynolds told me “the two biggest factors affecting the market now are the ESG/green agenda and rising interest rates”.
“The green agenda is to reduce carbon emissions, and interest rate policy is to reduce economic activity and lower inflation, but building big numbers of new homes runs contrary to those.”
While it’s counter-intuitive, Mr Reynolds believes that a national shift to focusing on retrofitting commercial buildings for residential use will not only see us more likely to make our carbon emission targets, but will produce homes more quickly in the short term.
Large scale schemes of new builds get caught up in endless planning delays and market downturns. With retrofitting, the building is already there and there are planning exemptions.