Rapid built environment evidence for policy & planning adaptation for global heating

The built environment is the “Low hanging fruit” for decarbonization because many buildings can be made much more efficient inexpensively at the design stage and then be built to handle the heat and cold extremes of climate change more effectively. For existing building operations, fuel switching (from fossil fuels to electricity), behaviour change, and renewables can be rapid, with costs reimbursed quickly (4-6 years). Given the imperative of global heating, the foresight of these policy missions, and the myriad benefits of low carbon buildings, it is reasonable to ask “Why aren’t we there yet?”

India has exemplary national policies to support a low-carbon society: the Smart Grid Mission, the Residential Energy Conservation Building code and the Solar Mission to name a few. At the state level, there are programmes for demand-side management (DSM) and power utility reforms. When all of these policies are fully implemented, it will also decarbonize buildings and the grid. India’s current target for this is 2070.

For housing, policies are implemented and adapted by states and then enforced by local governments. This is thus a multi-agency responsibility. Whether a new housing development is actually licenced or not depends on enforcement, time, costs, and the procedural burden of government engagement. These obstacles are called path dependencies—past decisions, including laws, that may inhibit modernisation. The implementation of national building efficiency legislation can’t reach unlicensed builders. Licencing is becoming easier with digital technologies and better design tools, but it can be seen that real change occurs locally, in a local context, with unique historical, political, social, and environmental considerations. This diversity is, in fact, rather valuable because local policy implementation undergoes thousands of natural experiments as urban local governments (ULBs) adapt regulations to local contexts. Successful implementations can be promoted to other cities and states. A great example of this is Ahmedabad’s city implementation of the India Heat Action Plan, which has led to innovative civil society support through innovative microfinance of thermal roof coatings for low income housing.

However, national policy implementations are also slow because of the complexity of local environments. For example, top-down policies for vehicular traffic may set straightforward road capacity and transit goals, but adding more roads actually leads to more traffic (called “rebound”) and even worse traffic (called “backfire”). Transport planning in one modern city has been claimed as a wicked problem, with properties first identified by Rittel and Webber (1973). In traffic planning, it is not clear where to intervene, and traffic congestion seems resistant to individual solutions such as widening one road. Climate change is also a wicked problem for built environment planning because built environment planning interacts with climate and traffic. It finds a mentioned in a paper titled Sustainability in Construction and Built Environment: A “Wicked Problem”? published in Smart and Sustainable Built Environment. This is why we “aren’t there yet” with large-scale urban adaptations and mitigations for global warming.

Built environment policy implementation must consider this wickedness as mentioned in Wicked Problems in Public Policy by BW Head. Fortunately, the wicked problem field is mature, and there are tools and approaches we can use for policy implementation at the state, city, and building levels. These solutions are called systems solutions since they attempt to account for complexity, emergence, multi-agency, non-linearity, nesting, adaptation, and path dependencies in local environments. A city-wide traffic congestion charge is a popular policy that has greatly improved traffic problems in cities like Stockholm, even if an early Stockholm trial was run amid considerable resistance to congestion charges. The same opportunity exists for rapidly bringing high performing, low-carbon, affordable housing to billions of people. To know what will work best in any new context, the key risk mitigation action is a trial of possible policy implementations.

Policies targeting building energy performance overall will reduce the pressure on this problem, as will congestion charges in city-wide traffic planning. However, the manner in which low-income occupants can keep their homes cool from hot outside winds and direct sunlight in order to avoid installing mechanical cooling requires trials of passive cooling techniques, among other approaches. Government regulatory design is a good way to approach such complex systems because policy can be strongly evidenced; it can be implemented at different scales; and it can provide dynamic control that triggers on emergent events.

Rapid human-centred trials in living buildings and homes can provide evidence for various policy settings at the city and regional levels. The technical support that can help governments better cope with wicked problems is thus tested using modern methods of iteration, co-production, and co-design. This approach might be termed policy living labs. Utility living labs, as mentioned in the publication Water for Tomorrow: A Living Lab on the Creation of the Science-Policy-Stakeholder Interface, and energy regulatory sandboxes have existed for quite some time, but an open platform for trials in living buildings is needed now for trials of what zero carbon living would look like today and how regulations and policies can accelerate and scale it.

A city-wide traffic congestion charge is a popular policy that has greatly improved traffic problems in cities like Stockholm, even if an early Stockholm trial was run amid considerable resistance to congestion charges. The same opportunity exists for rapidly bringing high performing, low-carbon, affordable housing to billions of people. To know what will work best in any new context, the key risk mitigation action is a trial of possible policy implementations