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Episode 17 - Part 3: The Built Environment, carbon and sustainability
64 Plays2 years ago
In part 3 of episode 2 with Ian Boyd from Arc Consulting, we're discussing the Built Environment, carbon and sustainability.
How do we manage the process of building properties to produce less carbon, and provide better spaces?
Changes to the design and build process can help firms achieve a lower carbon impact, and achieve many of the sustainability metrics they are required to focus on more easily.
Ian Boyd has worked in environmental conservation, ecological management and public engagement roles for over 30 years. He founded the Island 2000 Trust, the conservation charity Gift to Nature and inaugurated the Newport Rivers Group and Island Rivers.
He has worked for national and local charities, public sector and in private practice at locations across England and Wales and has managed coastal and freshwater reserves in Suffolk and Kent, upland rivers in Cumbria and lowland rivers on the Isle of Wight.
Ian is extremely passionate about what he does and has some great insights across the three parts of this episode.
In part 3, looking at carbon and sustainability in the Built Environment bring together our first two parts and discuss:
Carbon management in building design and data sharing
Integrating sustainability metrics in project design
Efficient use of space in urban design for biodiversity and carbon benefits
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Transcript
Key Issues in Carbon Projects
00:00:00
Speaker
What are the key issues you see around the projects you work on around carbon in buildings? Is it purely an aging building stock aspect or is it more about how we're designing and building new projects?
00:00:17
Speaker
Is it also around the governance aspects in terms of how we have to report some things? Quite an open question, I think, a big one. Yeah, and from the outset, I'm not a carbon expert. I'm not a BIM specialist.
Efficient Business Operations and Carbon
00:00:35
Speaker
So I look on from the point of view as someone who's been involved in a development project, perhaps around the public health community space side, certainly around the ecology and landscape design side.
00:00:45
Speaker
So we get involved in carbon discussions around carbon measurement. The focus generally, from my perspective anyway, tends to be on the efficient operation of the individual business unit. So how things like its insulation, things like is there any renewables plugged into it? So the kind of basics, I'm working on a retrofit project recently, it really brought people in far, far more than I do. Just these very basic things about
00:01:15
Speaker
the proper balance between insulation and ventilation in buildings. Draft exclusion, very simple opportunities for retrofit renewables, if they're not already on the site, are just a bit like we're talking about with the swift boxes as well. They're just fundamental. They're just absolute basics around efficient energy management of buildings. And therefore, it's a carbon discussion that these kind of really essential things should be just part of the way that we think about
00:01:44
Speaker
building design from the outset, and increasingly that is the case, of course.
Technology and Data Sharing in Buildings
00:01:47
Speaker
So in terms of building technology, again, from the point of view of a layman entirely, it seems to be becoming more and more sophisticated. One of the interesting things about that, I think, particularly in industrial settings, in those kind of common or managed settings where you have a set of tenant businesses, or you have an investment property, might be a, let's say, for example, a shopping center, we work with investment managers quite a bit.
00:02:12
Speaker
is at that point where you have a resource management facility around data collection. The carbon is only one part of that, energy and water, waste. All of these ultimately have a carbon function, of course. It's the sharing of that data. So I think this is something that we can do much better on is the way that the data collection from individual properties, from installations within those properties,
00:02:41
Speaker
collectively aggregated around an estate that that data is shared with the tenant community or with the community of whoever it is who's using that site. The more that we can actually say well that this building is performing at this level in terms of its overall carbon management that's above or below what we expected.
00:03:01
Speaker
then you're beginning again to open a conversation just as we talked about with wildlife where we can say, well, I've got some ideas about that. I've got some things I think I could contribute to this. Let's test them out and let's see what happens. So metrics and data collection can be fantastically valuable once they become a commons. If we share with far too tight with that kind of data, sometimes that data is collected and never seen again, it's just collected for no apparent purpose. But if we can collect building performance, development performance data around
00:03:31
Speaker
carbon, energy, water, waste around this collective sustainability kind of bundle, and find ways of sharing it with that community of residents or businesses, then we're going to again find that there will be great ideas, shared projects, things will move on, new ideas will emerge.
Data Repositories for Building Performance
00:03:50
Speaker
But I think we have to be more engaging. It's a technocratic business because it's a complex area that I don't present fully into that at all. And that has to be recognized. This isn't just a free for all.
00:04:01
Speaker
But once that data has been, the capture of the relevant data has been designed, then it should become a commons. That should be in a repository where I know I can find it. And it's presented to me in a way that I can understand. And I think that's possible. I think it's possible on any development to have that visible to the performance of your building in terms of perhaps even boiled down entirely in terms of. So I think building performance, data collection, data sharing is one whole thing that could be fascinating to improve. And some places are doing this.
00:04:31
Speaker
My colleague, Nijen, I went to Gibraltar recently to talk with the... Oh yeah, I'm also hosting a big meeting. And this was one of the... It's a fascinating place where land is at such a premium. It's extraordinary. So the built environment is very condensed, very concentrated. And they're beginning to talk about sophisticated building design and the sharing of the data that comes from that in such a way that we can learn the next iteration gets better, the next iteration gets better.
00:05:00
Speaker
retrofit solutions emerge within those communities. So there's a whole bunch of stuff around that I think that would be helpful for us to explore.
00:05:08
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose something I saw you discuss was around potentially collecting the wrong metrics. I can't remember if it was around ESG or something else, but in terms of the biodiversity aspect and the wellbeing aspect with buildings, what are you seeing that are the metrics perhaps we're focusing on in the wrong way or the metrics we're not even looking at at all that would make a big difference to those, do you think?
Siloed Sustainability Metrics
00:05:35
Speaker
I think it's more that they're siloed. I think it's
00:05:38
Speaker
The data we collect, particularly the way that sustainability indicators and metrics are set out, whether that's whatever performance metric you're working with, whether this is your ESG returns or other forms of return to an accrediting body or a compliance organization, they are inevitably siloed. So you will have waste, you will have water, you will have energy of different forms of energy, you may have
00:06:05
Speaker
I've never seen a human health one in any of those categories. Hard one to deal with, but it should be there. BNG or the assessment of ongoing cumulative gains around biodiversity units may well be in there, or at least the BRIAM data will probably be in there, but they will all be siloed and treated separately. One of the big issues, and we've talked about this a little bit already,
00:06:31
Speaker
is, and again, this is something that a conventional development and construction program finds very difficult to do, because it is, in a sense, it's an additional task, is to aggregate all of those metrics, is to pull them all together in a more qualitative, warm data kind of fashion, so that I am very deliberately asking myself questions about waste management and biodiversity at
Integrating Waste and Biodiversity in Urban Spaces
00:06:54
Speaker
the same time. Well, how can they be educated? Well, they are.
00:06:57
Speaker
So if I'm going to build a communal food composting site, I'm going to do it in such a way that it's actually become a superb habitat for a whole bunch of urban wildlife. So straight away, I've blamed two credits for one installation. In the same way we talked about in the case of build, that I'm going to retain as much material on site as I possibly can. I'm going to wipe out all of that carbon expenditure on those unnecessary journeys and fuel points.
00:07:25
Speaker
I'm going to keep it all there, but I'm going to create a space that's better for people and better for wildlife. Well, that's a whole bunch of metrics in one simple design. The reintegrating metrics into a combined approach to project design is something that I think we need to do. We're encouraging more and more to separate them out. And you work on a team and a development team, there will be a separate consultant for every single one of those metrics without any doubt at all. And we might do one another, but we might not.
00:07:53
Speaker
So the way that these development projects are managed needs this idea of deliberately asking these provocative questions that kind of it's a sort of thing that if you're interested in creative thinking and the sort of Edward de Bono kind of stuff, these are the sort of exercises you used to do takes two seemingly unrelated objects, stick them together and look for something interesting that comes from
00:08:15
Speaker
And that's what we should be doing in metrics, taking that water attenuation or water supply metric and sticking it alongside this human well-being and this carbon and this biodiversity metric and crunching them together and saying, well, how can I get multiple benefits with one single action? What am I doing wrong? Why have I
00:08:33
Speaker
It's very inefficient in space because development tends to follow metric in such a way that you have a space allocated with water, a space allocated for waste, space allocated for energy, a space allocated for biodiversity, and a space allocated for people in general outdoors. Well, that tends to create sprawl. Sprawl is endemic in the UK because we've got plenty of space. UK is, what, I don't know, 80% rural still. The Isle of Wight, where I work,
00:08:58
Speaker
here is 90% rural, even though we kind of have conversations about concreting over the countryside. It's just nonsense.
Metrics-Driven Development and Urban Sprawl
00:09:05
Speaker
It's just ludicrous because it's never going to happen, partly because of the existing pattern of environmental designations and landscape designations.
00:09:12
Speaker
So consequently sprawl is really easy. It's really easy to creep out and metrics drive sprawl. We need to pull this back in. Like we're saying earlier, make smaller gardens, create big public spaces, but make those public spaces incredibly lumpy and interesting and strange and unusual, provocative and fascinating, rather than just having acres of dead flats. The least efficient use of sprawl, obviously, is just a flat surface.
00:09:38
Speaker
Let's make taller buildings as well. Why are all our buildings so small? I do not understand it. We keep making tiny buildings. So I think, weirdly, bringing metrics together around ultimately a carbon conversation, because an efficient ecological system is carbon beneficial because of the way that it cycles nutrients and so on. There's all sorts of benefits around it. So let's call it a carbon conversation if that helps. Crumbs the metrics together.
00:10:05
Speaker
and deploy them in the way that we design and manage the places that we are building in such a way that we remove this tendency to sprawl. We bring people and things much closer together and much closer proximity and generate a much more active, healthy, interesting and fulfilling place to live or work.
Farm Model for Urban Design and Biodiversity
00:10:26
Speaker
It's interesting. I'm now thinking of a mini film, I suppose, or documentary on Netflix called The Biggest Little Farm. I don't know if you've seen that. It was really lovely. It was basically how everything feeds into each other. When you talked about all the metrics being looked at together and how they interrelate and so on.
00:10:49
Speaker
Basically on this farm, they wanted to create, I think it was 200 acres. They had a lot of investments put into it, but they didn't want to be a farm that was, we just grow one type of apple and sell that. They wanted, they grow 70 types of plums and all these different things and apples and the sheep and the pigs and the chickens and all this type of stuff.
00:11:08
Speaker
and it was all designed to sort of sustain itself you know so the I don't know they had too many snails in the orchards the the ducks went and ate that the the droppings from that then fertilized the fertilized the ground and that you know in turn supported something else and
00:11:27
Speaker
And it took them a while to get that balance. It was, I think, three years at least before the balance started to flow nicely. And then seven years overall where everything really had its natural rhythm again. And it just looked amazing. It was really healthy. And I think it ties in with what you've been saying about building these better environments for biodiversity, for wellbeing, and how it all starts to prosper very nicely once you foster that environment and support it.
00:11:55
Speaker
Yes, exactly. And there are lots of interesting parallels with forest gardening, with permaculture, all sorts of very interesting parallels. And we can learn from these ideas in the way that we build urban landscaping, just as you were saying, by very deliberately filling all the niches. When we do urban landscaping, it's very, we tend to either just do canopy, so we just plant trees or sticks that will just come up with nothing underneath, or we just do the understory, which is just the kind of shrub layer, or we just do the herbaceous layer.
00:12:24
Speaker
Instead, we shouldn't be doing all of those. We should be combining all of them. But that will take three or four years to shuffle about until it's found that it's balanced. And after that, it pretty much looks after itself. So absolutely, this idea of a very concentrated and very intentional design to pull metrics in real life close together in very close proximity to the cumulative gains is absolutely how we should be approaching the built environment.
Efficient Space Use in Urban Design
00:12:55
Speaker
It's very efficient. It releases space for other things. Suddenly the development is actually got 30% extra to play with. What do we do with that? Maybe we do nothing with it. Maybe there's an interesting collaboration with a civic partner around this use of space. Who knows? Maybe it's set aside for BNG offsets from somewhere else. Something I have major problems with, but let's just say, and then suddenly it's a source of income. So there's all sorts of interesting ways when you think about space efficiency. And space efficiency is carbon efficiency as well.
00:13:25
Speaker
So it is pulling things together, concentrating impacts, heterogeneity over homogeneity, and a tight design approach to even the smallest spaces. That's the key to this though.
00:13:39
Speaker
Thank you for coming today.
Engaging with Arc Consulting
00:13:41
Speaker
And I've found it really interesting going through everything. There's a lot more I think we could talk about for hours. I'd love to. But thank you for sharing your thoughts. And if anyone wants to get in touch to learn more about what you do and how they can potentially work with you on different projects, how do they get in touch? So they can get in touch with me directly on email. And my email is ian at ark-consulting.co.uk.
00:14:09
Speaker
Have a look at the Arc Biodiversity and Climate website. You'll find all our contacts there. Have a look at the Articology site as well, and you'll find us there. Our numbers are up there as well. So you'll track us down anyway. If you put in Arc, I look like you'll find us, don't worry. And we're always very happy to talk to anyone about this kind of stuff, finding new and interesting ways. And of course, we always learn from the folks that we work with. We always come away happy with it. Do a better, okay.
00:15:00
Speaker
Lovely, thank you very much for coming on. Okay, thank you.