Late on Thursday arvo came a missive that could have been directed straight to the property industry.
The headline was that unchecked resource use will lead to “catastrophic impacts” on human wellbeing.
Why that’s frightening is that the built environment people keep saying that the industry footprint will triple by 2030.
The words keep tripping off the tongue as if they’re reporting that the 5:20 from Flinders Street Station will be 10 minutes late today.
What exactly do we think we are going to use for the buildings and connecting infrastructure to make our new world cities and towns? Think of all we need: concrete, steel, timber, bricks and on it goes. And then the transport and food we need to connect human life to these places?
Alternative organic/natural/low carbon building materials are far from commercialised. Nice ideas but where’s the scale? Nor have we yet figured out a way to change the political dynamic for change.
As we all know, no amount of facts, figures or logical science can shift the thinking – only stories can. And by that, we mean politics. And by that, we mean those who speak loudest or those who quietly raise an eyebrow at exactly the right time.
Here’s a fact that won’t shift the political landscape one iota: the federal government gets more from student loan repayments than the petroleum resource rent tax.
And how are we going when it comes to measuring our progress and impact on the planet and people from the built environment? Not very well.
Our research and briefing sessions for the next masterclass, Sustainability Reporting – tools and tactics reveal technology and software solutions need a lot of work to get right.
The view is brilliant technology that’s not integrated at best, badly briefed and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars at worst.
This means that, quite frankly, we don’t know how we are actually tracking.
But things are changing.
The statement that arrived Thursday under embargo was that we now have “vital analytical tools” that show the extent of the bad news on resources. And we absolutely need to know this.
University of Sydney researchers Dr Mengyu Li and Professor Manfred Lenzen have published a report that reveals “an insatiable global appetite for resources” that, if unchecked, will “culminate in catastrophic impacts on the earth system and ecological processes that underpin human wellbeing and the diversity of life on our planet”.
They say the way material resources are extracted and processed contributes to:
- 55 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions
- 90 per cent of terrestrial biodiversity loss
- 40 per cent of the particulate health-related impacts across the planet.
Dr Li said: “Material extraction has tripled in the past 50 years and is growing. This is clearly unsustainable and drives the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity decline, and pollution and waste.
“Our work reports on two UN Sustainable Development Goals by assessing global material footprints, a reflection of primary materials needed to meet countries’ consumption. This includes concrete and bricks for building; metals for mobility and transport; biomass for food; coal, oil and gas for energy.”
Solutions they recommend include to:
- reduce the resource intensity of food, mobility, housing and energy
- decouple economic activity from resource extraction through circular economy, sustainable urbanisation, recycling and resource sufficiency
- focus on supply-side (production) efficiencies must be joined by improved demand-side (consumption) changes
The full report will be available online at this link on Saturday morning, Sydney time.