Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering, University of Toronto, 35 St George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4, Canada.
Environ Sci Technol. 2024 Jun 25;58(25):10979-10990. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.4c02070. Epub 2024 Jun 13.
Global demand for housing and the climate crisis have created a seemingly impossible choice between the need to build more and the need to emit less from construction materials. Here, we present the future infrastructure growth (FIG) model, a generalizable method for finding pathways to build enough housing and infrastructure while reducing material emissions, in line with climate commitments. FIG uses open data to quantify the emissions of existing neighborhoods as if they were built new; it then uses these quantifications to forecast future cradle-to-gate embodied emissions from new residential buildings and linear infrastructure construction. This novel approach allows for detailed analysis that scales to a city, region, and/or national level and captures variability in construction norms, designs, and codes. We demonstrate FIG on Canada, using the model to find neighborhood-level drivers of embodied emissions and the most effective reduction strategies through 2030 and 2050. Current construction practices will cause a 437% overshoot of Canada's climate commitments if housing growth targets are met. Avoiding this overshoot requires a near-total reliance on multiunit buildings and best-in-class design supported by improvements in material manufacturing, building within existing urban boundaries, and halving the use of new materials.
全球对住房的需求和气候危机使得在增加住房供应和减少建筑材料排放之间的选择变得似乎不可能。在这里，我们提出了未来基础设施增长（FIG）模型，这是一种通用方法，可以找到在符合气候承诺的前提下，建造足够住房和基础设施的途径，同时减少材料排放。FIG 使用公开数据来量化现有社区的排放，就好像它们是新建的一样；然后，它使用这些量化数据来预测新住宅建筑和线性基础设施建设的摇篮到大门的未来隐含排放。这种新颖的方法允许进行详细的分析，可以扩展到城市、地区和/或国家层面，并捕捉建筑规范、设计和规范的可变性。我们在加拿大展示了 FIG，使用该模型在 2030 年和 2050 年之前确定隐含排放的社区层面驱动因素和最有效的减排策略。如果满足住房增长目标，当前的建筑实践将导致加拿大的气候承诺超支 437%。要避免这种超支，需要几乎完全依赖于多单元建筑和支持材料制造改进、在现有城市边界内建设以及将新材料使用量减半的最佳设计。
