Design Can Reduction Roadmap

How can we align the Danish regulation with climate science when it comes to sustainability in the building industry? Right now, the Danish building regulation for 2025 is being negotiated - an important element if we are to comply with the Paris Agreement.? In this episode, Mikkel Schlesinger and Harpa Birgisdottir will give us insight into the Reduction Roadmap, a tool guiding regulators and the industry toward meeting CO2 targets.

Mikkel Schlesinger is a Partner and Architect at CEBRA architecture and one of the key Initiators of the Reduction Roadmap.

Harpa Birgisdottir is a Professor in sustainable building at BUILD at Aalborg University and a board member of the Green Building Council Denmark and Molio. She is also a part of the Reduction Roadmap initiative.?

Kristina May is a Founding Partner and brand specialist at AM Copenhagen. Kristina invented the podcast Design Kan, the number one design podcast in Denmark, and has hosted more than 80 episodes over the past four years.

Kristina: The Reduction Roadmap was created a year ago as a supervisory project that for the first time worked to translate the Paris Agreement and the Planetary Boundary for Climate Change into industry-specific reduction targets for new Danish housing projects.

The Reduction Plan identified where we were, where we were going, and the rate at which we needed to reduce our carbon emissions to reach the Earth's safe operating zone.

Already, a year later, our climate change situation is so bad that we can't even follow the original roadmap, but must take much more drastic action if we are to reach the Paris Agreement. That's what we're going to talk about today, and I've invited Mikkel Schlesinger and Harpa Birgisdottir. Mikkel, why don't you start by giving a brief introduction to who created the Reduction Roadmap and why you found it necessary?

Mikkel: Well, we started Reduction Roadmap back in the day because we were frustrated with continuing to build the same way we've been building for the last 10 years, while at the same time, we could see that climate change was roaring ahead. We kept meeting at conferences and writing reports that talked about sustainable building and green building, but the reality was that we were looking into the projects we were doing.

Kristina: And who are we? Where do you come from as an architect? Can you tell us a bit about your profession?

Mikkel: I come from CEBRA architecture and I'm a partner there. We started the Reduction Roadmap together with EFFEKT, a group of architects, and Artelia, who are engineers.

It started with a survey on LinkedIn, where I wrote with EFFEKT that we were getting tired of all the talk in the industry and with very little action.

We decided that together we would try to do something about it. We measured the impact of our projects. Where were we today? Then we set a clear goal to make a change and start making it more sustainable in terms of climate.

Kristina: How many years are we back here?

Mikkel: We're about two years back. We started writing together and agreed to meet for a cup of coffee, then we went to EFFEKT and talked about how we could do this.

About two years ago, we had a tool that everyone agreed to use. LCA barley, which measures construction and CO2 emissions.

Kristina: And who made the tool?

Mikkel: BUILD and Aalborg University and Harpa Byg, which sits next door. That's also why it's perfect that she can join us today and tell us a little more about what was behind it and what kind of tool it was.

Kristina: So what happened from then on out?

Mikkel: We agreed that with Harpa's and BUILD’s groundwork, we had a tool to measure with. We also knew roughly where we were as an industry because a report had been made together with SBI, which told us about 60 ordinary buildings where they were.

They said that an ordinary building emits around 9.5 kg CO2 per m2 per year in the 50-year period which is measured in what is considered a life cycle. And that was a pretty consistent number.

So all the measured buildings were pretty close to each other. So we knew where we were, and we also had a tool to measure with. What we couldn't figure out was where we were going. So what would it mean to build sustainably? And it was quite shocking because we'd been talking about it for so long, and we'd known that we had this challenge for the last 20 years.

Kristina: Aren't there any countries that were ahead of us?

Mikkel: No, there is simply no one in the world who has sat down and calculated where we needed to go with construction to be able to say that it was climate sustainable.

Kristina: And just try to put some numbers on what construction is responsible for, or should we say what construction is responsible for in terms of emissions?

Mikkel: Yes, on a global scale, it accounts for around 40% of total CO2 emissions.

In Denmark, it's around 30%.

Kristina: 40% everywhere? The problem of climate change is 40% there, and no one considered this before.

Harpa: Research has looked at it. So first of all, in the research we've talked about before, we've analyzed where the conventional buildings we build today are located. And that's what we talked about in our reports; where is the climate impact of the buildings we build out there? But in research, we also look at where we should be within planetary boundaries and have calculated it, but we never know exactly where we're going.

But what is perhaps also really lacking is communicating what we do in research to the industry and the players understandably.

We've managed to build a lot of that bridge here, visualized it, and made it understandable in the Reduction Roadmap. Because as I've sometimes said before, we've prescribed to say where we need to go if we're going to build something that we sometimes call sustainable, or build within planetary boundaries.

I've shown that before we build around here, we must be far below that. But people don't have a chance to absorb it and understand it until it's also precisely defined in the Reduction Roadmap. So it's important.

Kristina: We had a little talk about, just before we went on, the fact that there is a research unit that knows a whole lot, that has made a report, but it just hasn't been translated into something that someone might understand, or someone knows how to use it, or no one has bothered to do it. Maybe that's where you've come in about your project, and say, “How do we concretize it?” That's really what design can do. It can translate something extremely complicated, and make it possible to look at it differently. So, can you put into a few more words what the Reduction Roadmap ended up being a year ago?

Mikkel: What we needed to start doing something was a clear goal. That is, to find out what it means to build sustainably. And then, how do we get there? Is it even possible? And that's what the Reduction Roadmap has shown us. What we did when we realized that there was a lack of a clear goal, was we called a researcher. We contacted Steffen Petersen from Aarhus University because he has previously been involved in translating planetary boundaries and global climate emissions into something that could be used in construction. He was keen to help and assembled a team of the leading researchers in Denmark, including Harpa and Morten Birkved from SDU and Morten Ryberg, who came together to define a boundary that we could work towards. And they spent the better part of a year talking about it and agreeing on it.

And what they came back with was a translation of what is called the planetary boundaries for climate emissions for the entire planet. Where they put an updated number on it. And what it showed was that we would have to reduce by 96 percent.

Kristina: Reduce by 96 percent?

Mikkel: 96 percent, that is, by a factor of 20 compared to where we are today.

Kristina: Because otherwise what?

Mikkel: Because otherwise, we won't stop climate change. The planetary boundaries define the limit of where we get back within the safe operating budget for the planet.

That means that we're getting back to where we can start rolling back climate change and prevent the temperature on Earth from rising any more. And that's what they came back with and said, “If we're going to get back there, we need to reduce by 96 percent.” And that was a bit of a gut punch because we had counted on it, we're probably going to get down to something like a quarter or a fifth.

Then we asked, when are we going to get there? And they said you should have done that. We're already in the process. We're already looking at climate change today. We have a 1-degree temperature increase today. And right now we are looking at at least one and a half degrees, maybe two, maybe more.

That is the development we need to slow down and stop.

Kristina: Why is it that others haven't already taken care of this? Just like Denmark. Why are we the ones creating a Reduction Roadmap?

Harpa: There are reports after reports from the IPCC, etc. Every three years, reports come out that say it is bad. We are emitting more. We haven't managed to reduce. But in reality, I would say that not too many years ago, I think people haven't been resistant to it. So it's only now, not too long ago. If we're talking about Denmark, for a long period we thought we were a pioneering country.

It may well be that we have been a pioneering country. But you haven't measured against what? And it's just obvious that our consumption and so on exceeds the planet's limits several times over.

It is also very visual that we use resources as if we have more than four planets available in Denmark. And that's why it's clear - it's clear to everyone, if you want to face it, that it's not sustainable in the long run. It's no longer sustainable at all. And if we talk about the reduction roadmap, then what it has done is to try to take, okay, where were we in the construction?

And Mikkel talked about, “Well, about 10 kilograms of CO2 per square meter, per word number of new construction.”

But making a staircase down, if we're going down this one, reduces by 96 percent and gives that staircase, so you can see how I get from 10 to a very low number. But what's so important when we have this stepped ladder down, is that we can then also find a lot of buildings that we know we can build, which can be located within that staircase. So what's also really important for us is that we don't know how to get down to the lowest step, but we know today how we can reduce quite a lot more, that is, we can follow the stepladder. And it's an important message that we have solutions on how we can build today within this if people can imagine that staircase. But we don't know how we're going to solve it in a few years, so that's why we have to develop quickly.

Kristina: If there is anyone out there who would like to see this staircase, you can see it on the website; https://www.reductionroadmap.dk . It contains information about both the previous roadmap and where we are today, which we will talk about in more detail. And there is also the model that you refer to, Harpa, which is visual and explainable. Reducing in the way that we're talking about, do people even understand it? Do we understand it?? We're talking kilos, we're talking within so many square meters. It's so hard to understand. Do you understand it as architects? Of course, you understand it as a researcher.

It's one thing to talk about the Reduction Roadmap, but how do we make it genuinely understandable, tangible, and noticeable to people? Is it about saying we need to cut down because we don't even know what we're using for all the communication around it, it's not completely upside down. Shouldn't we also talk about everything you do that emits that stuff?

So it's not about saving anything, but that's why you have to cut it out? I'm just thinking, isn't there something wrong with our communication language when it comes to reducing something we don't understand?

Mikkel: I think the strength of the roadmap is that it made it understandable, visualized it, and made it clear. You may not understand what 10 kilos of CO2 equivalents per square meter per year means, but it doesn't matter that much because if we know where we are today, and we know that we need to get down to almost 0, then it's pretty clear to understand. And what the roadmap has provided, is a route to 0 and a schedule. And the way we arrived at that was by taking the planetary boundaries and the input from the scientists, and then linking it to the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement has a budget, and it's not a scientific budget, but a politically determined budget that says we can allow up to one and a half degrees of temperature increase on Earth.

Kristina: Do you call that a budget?

Mikkel: Yes, it is a budget. It tells us how much CO2 we can emit into the atmosphere before we get there. So the Paris Agreement is a budget for how much CO2 we have left before we reach the limit we have jointly agreed upon.

Those are the two concepts we've used in the roadmap. One is the planetary boundaries, i.e. where we need to go to get back, and the other is the budget in the Paris Agreement, which tells us how much we can emit now before we reach this limit of 1.5 degrees, which will double the consequences we see today.

In other words, the droughts, floods, and migrations we already see today will be doubled when we reach 1.5 degrees. So it's not because it's a dream scenario, but it's the maximum we can accept in the Paris Agreement. And we know the budget for that. When we started in 2019, when we had the last figures, we had about seven years left. If we continue as we have done so far. And that means today, three years back, four years back, if we continue with the emissions we have.

And what the roadmap kind of suggested was, what if we start to reduce and follow a line down towards zero, then we can take the budget that we don't use and add it to the back, and in that way get more time to reach the goal. That's really what the roadmap is all about. We have visualized and concretized it, so that year by year you can see where you need to be to stay within the Paris Agreement and be on the way toward the planetary boundaries. That has meant that because it visualizes that you can see this staircase in front of you, and some numbers are relatable, that reflects the new legislation we just got in Denmark, which says that you have to measure all your buildings and that we have a tool that everyone agrees on how we measure. So in context, it makes it extremely easy to act on.

Kristina: So all these players, it's not just architects, it's the entire construction industry we're talking about. Do they know what to do? Do they know, well, one thing is that they can see this budget, it's a bit like if I was told that I had to make 20 million more in sales, so get on with it.

How do I do that? What about the solutions? Where does it go? Because it's one thing to show it, but then what do you do? As a material manufacturer, what do you do?

Harpa: Today, we have it in our building legislation. So every time you build a new building, you have to be able to calculate the climate impact of the building you're building, and you have a cap on how much you can emit from this building. Then the question is, does everyone in the construction industry know about it?

Even though it's a new legislation that has been introduced this year in 2023. I think most people now know about it, but of course, it's a completely new way of thinking when you have to build for a lot of people. That you have to think about not only what building you're going to build, and whether it's going to last and how much it's going to cost. But now you have to think about the materials you choose. How much is the climate impact?

Kristina: Also the way you run the construction site. It's a huge calculation.

Harpa: Now we have a lot of focus on the materials you put into the building, then also the energy consumption in the building afterward. So you can do that. And that all players are involved.

Both those who design the building. They can do this, they can optimize it, calculate it, optimize, and find solutions for it. And then you have to use some materials, and it's also really important that the material manufacturers are on board and develop new materials that are less environmentally harmful.

Kristina: Is everyone on board with this?

Mikkel: Everyone is on board. It's the law. And that's what's amazing, that I think we're one of the only industries in the world that can do this right now. We have this hugely complex data set in place. We have legislation in place, we have the tools in place, and we have everything for it in Denmark.

This also means that we can be the first in the world to set concrete targets, and we are the first country in the world to have introduced this limit.

And now we can also choose to include it in the Paris Agreement.

Harpa: Denmark is a small country. But Denmark can help inspire others. I've heard from Danish architects who find it easier now to do projects abroad because they've become accustomed to this discipline, so they know it, and therefore it's easier to win competitions abroad because they are ahead in this area. So it can also become a competitive parameter as such.

Kristina: It's almost a Danish brand value that we're making a name for ourselves in the construction industry, how the heck do we communicate this to the rest of the world when we assume that we have such an incredibly small part of the overall account on our shoulders?

Mikkel: Many people look at Denmark in terms of systems, society, and construction. And Danish architecture is big abroad, and we export a lot. So if we find some solutions that have both a great amenity value, and that people can see themselves in, it could be some of the answers to the future of construction all over the world.

We can't export everything one by one, but we can inspire a change in the way we build and get it within the Paris Agreement in the first instance, and secondly, in the slightly longer perspective, get it within the planetary boundaries.

And that's the goal.

Kristina: One year after I started by saying that it was one year ago that the Reduction Roadmap was first launched. A year after that, the roadmap was due for an update, and you're in for a bit of a shock.

And you've launched a campaign. You've started a movement where you're bringing the whole industry together. It's impressive, maybe it's also because I'm a bit colored by it and follow a lot of people who are involved in it.

But LinkedIn has been full of green posts saying “We support that building legislation should reflect climate science to comply with the Paris Agreement,” which is the claim you're making. What was the shock? And what's next?

Mikkel: There have been two shocks so far: The first shock was the planetary boundaries and how far we had to go. The second shock was when we updated the numbers from the UN reports from 2019 to 2022, where the budget that we thought was going to take seven years, we had already spent half of it. In other words, the roadmap is simply getting steeper. We are eating up the budget much faster than we had anticipated, and we didn't start reducing globally. On the contrary, we are spending more and more. It means that the whole idea of a roadmap is starting to eat itself a little bit.?

Every time we update it, it gets steeper and steeper. Pretty soon, it's going to get vertical. Therefore, we need to change our mindset, and we're even busier than we first showed with the roadmap last year. It's not because the systematics or the numbers are changing, or the math is wrong. It's simply that we've spent more of the budget than we had hoped for.

That's why we need to do something now. The good news is that we already have legislation in place. A requirement has already been written into the building regulations for 2023, and there is a plan to adjust it again in 2025.

This fall, there is an opening to discuss where it should go. Right now, the requirement is 12 kilograms, which is certainly in the wrong direction compared to the average construction emissions of less than 10 kilograms today. But we can use the roadmap and also the new, updated version to look at, how far down we need to go in 2025 to get it raised within the Paris Agreement. And that's what we're going out now and saying that we need to be below 5.8 kilograms, i.e. about half the current level, to be within the Paris Agreement, which Denmark is committed to doing, and is even committed to being a pioneer in showing the rest of the world how to do it.?

And that is what we are in the process of getting the industry on board now, and then entering into a dialog with politicians so that they have this knowledge when they have to determine the new requirements for the building regulations for 2025, this fall. And we expect it to be adopted around the New Year, so right now there is a window of opportunity to influence it and hopefully move the entire industry within the Paris Agreement.

Kristina: How can someone be against it? How can you turn a blind eye to this? How can you continue? Is it just because there's so much money involved? What is it that makes everyone not just run in the same direction right away? I know that certain factors are often needed to move people, but it must put fear into the lives of everyone who comes across this information.

Mikkel: It does, and we haven't experienced any real resistance yet. We have yet to see those who stand up and say that we don't want this. On the contrary, there is overwhelming support from the industry to do this.?

Kristina: Right now, you can say that we support the fact that we want building legislation to reflect climate science, but you don't commit to anything. There is no action yet.

It's great that we're starting to get this movement. But we need to see the change. We need to see people doing something.

Harpa: Yes, and I think it's really important for people to understand that when we can see this when Mikkel says that the budget is overspent, and when you discover that it's one report after another, the reduction hasn't happened.

And it's important to understand that this is in all areas; in our food, in our transportation, in everything. So that means that we don't have anything to reduce, which is otherwise the plan when we make the Paris Agreement, in all areas.

But now we're talking about buildings. The way we build, the conventional way, and what we usually do, is a lot higher than where we should be if our legislation were to ensure that we are on the right path toward the Paris Agreement. We must remember, it also applies to our clothing purchases, to our food.

Now we're talking about construction. That's where you have to know that if we are to follow the reduction roadmap if we're going to follow the Paris Agreement, we have to optimize every time we build buildings. We should first always think about whether we should build a new building and how big it should be, etc. How big does it need to be??

But when it's us, to come up with some rigor inside our design practice, it's important, because first we optimize everything, and we also have to look at whether we're building differently. And that's where we've shown a lot of solutions on how to do that in residential construction. If I remember correctly, that staircase we talked about, is a Reduction Roadmap, and we have a lot of dots, we have a lot of buildings. We have some examples of how it can be done.

Kristina: Can you name some of them? In case you want to dive a little deeper into it.

Mikkel: Try looking at this 4-1-Planet, which is an initiative started by Villum and Realdania, who are also the ones who helped finance the Reduction Roadmap. They have created a website where they have collected benchmark projects on a wide range of projects that have come a long way down.

They have also started a project where they are trying to get residential projects down to somewhere in the range of 2 to 1.5 kilograms, a quarter of an average building. And it seems to be working, at least for the more simple housing types, such as detached and terraced houses.

It's a little more difficult for multi-story buildings and more complex constructions. But from these projects, we can see that we can succeed. That we can also get further down than the 6 kilos, which is the first step on the road to 2025.

Our next aim will be to try to set our sights on 0 in reality and see how to get there. Here the approaches are, firstly, to reduce the number of square meters, to be built, and secondly, to reuse far more than we do today. Don't build new, use recycled materials that have already emitted CO2 when they were produced, but can be reused. And when we build new buildings, use materials that have grown rather than materials that have been dug up.

That is materials that have absorbed CO2 in their life while growing. Like wood, straw, seagrass, and hemp. These are particularly interesting, for example, straw, because it grows very quickly, absorbs CO2, and at the same time it is a waste product from agriculture, which we have plenty of in Denmark.

It's used for insulation and can be compressed and used as wall elements. Just like we use concrete elements today, you can make a wood and straw element that you can then build with.

Straw helps to carry the load. Right now, you don't count it in the construction, but you could do that because when you press it hard enough, you can place it on top of it. But in principle, and there are examples of this from the straw houses from the 70s, you can build with bales of straw that are simply stacked. This is a further development of that, where you have a wooden skeleton with compressed straw in it.

Kristina: There's also the visual side of the ship, you could say.

Mikkel: Yes, it's one of the technologies that exist and that we know can have a negative footprint because it absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere when you build with it.

Kristina: What are the big sins in construction?

Harpa: When we look at our entire built environment with all our buildings, we have a very large proportion of existing buildings. And in them, energy consumption is the biggest issue. Denmark emits about 30%, one-third is from the materials we use and two-thirds from energy consumption.?

But when we build a new building, it's the materials that matter a lot. When we look 50 years ahead, it's the materials that are predominant. So each time, it has a total impact. It's quite important to think about, construction, what can we do throughout the entire construction process? But we also build new buildings every year, and it's the materials that we need to focus on. There is also a lot of talk about renovating our entire existing building stock.

We need a lot of materials for that, so we choose the right materials with a low climate impact.

Kristina: So what is the dream?

Mikkel: The dream right now is that we change the building regulations and get a requirement that makes the entire industry move together. Because that's what it takes to solve this. None of us, neither companies nor organizations, can do it alone. We have to do it together.

Kristina: And it has to be done as legislation? Because otherwise, no one will go first.??

Mikkel: It's legislation that creates the demand.

Because if you have to, you do it. And we have a great history of that in Denmark as well.? Because we have done it with operational energy. The energy used in buildings has been slashed to an extreme degree. It is reduced by 25 percent every five years over ten years and is very low today.

And this has had a clear effect. I remember ten years ago, when we sat and looked at these projections and said, “We'll never be able to do that, because we won't be able to have windows, we won't be able to have one-meter thick walls.” But technology has evolved, and because there has been a demand, and because there has been a requirement, and you could see it coming, the construction industry has developed in that direction, and it has been realized. We can do the same with this. Once the legislation is in place, everyone starts looking in the same direction, and then technology comes along. And we know how to do it.

Kristina: So we have the technologies, we have the possibilities. It's simply a matter of doing it. And it's about being forced to do it. And so that the seriousness is clear.

Mikkel: Yes, that's certainly what can move us all at once. Otherwise, it will be pioneers who run with it out of ideology or because they have a long-term investment. So if we all have to move at once, and that's what it takes to move the big budget, then it's the legislation that can pull it off.

Kristina: Mikkel and Harpa, it was a great pleasure to talk about the Reduction Roadmap. I would recommend everyone to spread the word and take a look at the website. Support it if you are in the industry. Talk to those you can.

If you understand lobbying, we need to change this legislation now. Because building legislation needs to reflect climate science to comply with the Paris Agreement. And it needs to happen right now.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you for reading this episode of Design Can. The guests were Mikkel Schlesinger and Harpa Birgisdottir. You can follow the podcast on Design Kan's website, Facebook profile, or AM Copenhagen's Instagram.