Green Triangle, Greenwashing, and Goodhart's Law

when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure - Goodhart's Law

Introduction

Bold claims of “net-zero” or “carbon free” are increasingly being made about new construction projects. Why are we seeing this trend? What does it mean? Are these claims actually indicative of a sustainable movement in the construction industry or just another marketing tool? In a 2017 report from the International Energy Agency and United Nations Environment Programme it was reported that total building construction and operations accounted for 36% of global energy use and almost 40% of energy related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In this post I want to laud efforts to quantify and reduce environmental impacts while offering a warning for its exploitation and misrepresentation in sustainable development projects. Sustainable development is originally defined in the Brundtland Report as, "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". To track impacts made in our race towards environmental mitigation, it's important to have common metrics to baseline our efforts.

Precedent

Business and sustainability metrics have been evolving for many decades, with the concept of? Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) starting as early as the 1930s and picking up wide-spread adoption through the 1980s and into the globalization of the 1990s (Agudelo, et al. 2019). Similarly, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria have become standards for investors to use in evaluating a company's behavior, a criteria thought to have officially developed from the 2004 report, “Who Cares Wins– Connecting Financial Markets to a Changing World”. Though complex to measure in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, ESG reporting is nevertheless becoming critical for firms. Nearly 30 years ago, John Elkington coined the term for another sustainability framework, "Triple Bottom Line" (Elkington 1994). In its simplest interpretation, the Triple Bottom Line measures a business's success by three metrics: people, profit, and planet.

In the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, countries agreed to curtail their release of Green House Gases (GHG) in an effort to prevent average global warming temperatures to be within 2° C of pre-industrial temperatures (Jacoby 2021). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change establishes the goal to limit the average global temperature to not exceed 1.5° C baselined to pre-industrial levels (IPCC 2015). Additionally, in 2015 the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit listed within its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goal 13: take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (UN SDGS).

In light of this, it is becoming increasingly important for AEC companies to deliver projects not only under budget and on time, but also within carbon accounting limits. In 2002, the non-profit organization Architecture 2030 was founded with the aim to dramatically reduce GHG emissions within the AEC industry by 2030. In 2014, the International Union of Architects adopted the 2050 Imperative to reduce AEC fossil fuel CO2 emissions to zero by 2050 (Architecture2030). The Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF), a non-profit hosted at the University of Washington, has issued two AEC challenges. The first is the SE 2050 Challenge states: “All structural engineers shall understand, reduce and ultimately eliminate embodied carbon in their projects by 2050.” The second is the MEP 2040 Challenge: “All systems engineers shall advocate for and achieve net zero carbon in their projects: operational carbon by 2030 and embodied carbon by 2040.” Even the US General Services Administration is setting limits on high-carbon emitting building materials. So, how do we begin to tackle these challenges?

The Traditional Iron Triangle

In traditional project management and project delivery there is a common framework called the Iron Triangle, or the triple constraint problem. The triangle represents the zero-sum trade-off in three key-performance indicators (KPI's): time, cost, and quality. Optimizing for one of these three vertices comes at a cost of the other two, so for successful project delivery, the project management (PM) team must successfully balance these three KPIs. In the PM literature within the last decade there have been additional varying proposals about how these KPIs are increasing in scope and how they might be incorporating sustainability measures (Toor, et al. 2010; Silvius, et al. 2015).

The Proposed Green Triangle

In order to achieve these environmental impact targets AEC companies and consultants are looking for methods to effectively measure and communicate these metrics, which subsequently increases the need for scrutiny in implementation. With construction projects increasingly aware of the carbon impact during their delivery and operation, it can be expected that construction project managers and owners are increasing their attention to its accounting. While the traditional Iron Triangle is a useful framework for general project management, in parallel a Green Triangle may become a useful framework for sustainable project solutions.

What does it mean to measure carbon? The CLF provides a great description of carbon in the built environment: "embodied carbon refers to the greenhouse gas emissions arising from the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of building materials. In contrast, operational carbon refers to the greenhouse gas emissions due to building energy consumption" (CLF 2020). For carbon to constitute a vertex of the project delivery triangle, it should be representative of the partition between both embodied and operational carbon.

With carbon making its way into project delivery KPIs, the question arises: what are general strategies to lower a project's embodied/operational carbon? The general mitigation hierarchy, listed in order of importance, include: avoid, reduce, restore/replace, compensate, offset. Through these steps we are seeing a rise in efforts in preservation and circular construction as well as innovations in carbon capture and bio-based construction materials to lower total life cycle carbon. It's important to not isolate the measurement of carbon and account for tradeoffs of the other vertices in the project delivery. The AEC industry as a whole must start thinking at a systems level about how to bring these carbon numbers down, and that begins with measuring a current carbon baseline.

Green Washing, and Good Measures Gone Bad

The earliest known use of the term "greenwashing" is from 1990 by activists in Southern California. The Oxford English dictionary defines greenwashing as, "the creation or propagation of an unfounded or misleading environmentalist image". With such high public and professional demand for sustainable development and lowering the carbon emissions associated with construction, it becomes easy, accidentally or intentionally, to construe a "green" narrative around a project (He et al. 2020). Common approaches in greenwashing behaviors (GWB) include (non-exhaustive): unsubstantiated claims or no proof, lack of definition, green by association, narrow scope, adherence to low standards, hidden trade-offs, and vague metrics.

I often see proud claims of sustainable projects posted across LinkedIn, but when the claims are challenged, often a dubious defense arises, such as:

• A skyscraper built out of wood! But the wood was shipped from a different continent.
• A net-zero facade! Well, it only contributes to a potential net-zero project by having 30% less embodied carbon than similar facades.
• The winter games in a clean energy, 100-mile-long city in the desert! Snow in a desert...?

We can see the emergence of the relevance of Goodhart's Law, an adage derived from the British economist of the same name, often quoted as, "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Common examples of this include the "publish or perish" paradigm in academia where the system rewards quantity and not the quality of publications, or the "cobra effect" arising from the British government offering a bounty in colonial India for dead cobras, incentivizing people to simply breed more cobras in order to kill them and receive the reward.

Conclusion

To ensure that the AEC industry is productively moving towards ecological preservation and the laid-out environmental goals, we need ways to measure progress. A proposed Green Triangle for simplified project KPIs may be a bit reductionist, but if carbon accounting is done thoroughly, properly, and transparently, then it may help accelerate the industry's movement to a net-zero sector. As coined by Cradle 2 Cradle, being less bad is not the same as being more good. While reaching true net-zero is the start of our journey, let our imaginations wonder to a future scenario where instead of sustainable design we move into regenerative design, and instead of off-setting impacts we help our ecosystems thrive.