Anderson Bell Christie issues a call to arms on embodied carbon
February 4 2025
Anderson Bell Christie (ABC) has extended moves to reposition the practice as a campaigning voice on policy, beyond the supply of 'standard' architectural design services, with a call to action on embodied carbon.
The studio has published new research which shows that the Scottish Government's ambition to achieve net zero by 2045 is unachievable without an immediate course correction.
The practice boasts that emissions accruing from its current home designs stand at 541kgCO2e/m2, well under the RIBA 2030 target of 625kgCO2e/m2, when considering the full life cycle of construction. To put that in perspective a 100-home development built to that standard, with zero emissions from heating systems, would produce 4,399 tonnes of embodied carbon emissions - around 17 times higher than the equivalent figure of 258 tonnes of CO2e emitted by heating and powering the properties for 60 years.
ABC director, Jonathan McQuillan, said, “Given the scale of the problem, we need to move the dialogue on to embodied carbon. Policy plans for embodied carbon haven’t left the starting blocks. We need a route to reach net zero with embodied carbon by 2045. The construction industry needs to show leadership and help shape legislation with the Scottish Government.
“ABC are using their extensive research to develop a roadmap to a holistic net zero position by 2045 that will address embodied carbon. We look forward to presenting this to the Scottish Government in early 2025. We only have 20 years to tackle this problem from scratch, given the timescales involved with legislative change, we need to start now.”
The Scottish Government is working towards introducing updated minimum building standards for all new housing, but not before early 2028.
16 Comments
#2 - That's a valid point and a bit more on-topic! Perhaps UR can approach Anderson Bell Christie for comment?
Am suggesting all these manoeuvres and discussions are rather pointless as the planet will die soon anyway unless you reform the money system we live under.
Am not talking about the economic system and am certainly not advocating for a soviet communist economic system.
Read properly and do your own research before putting words in other people’s mouths and making unpleasant accusations like this.
"If there is demolition then we account for demolition embodied carbon.
"Wyndford is not however an ABC project, so I can not provide comment on that."
#6 - Thanks for clarifying with ABC.
"The Anderson Bell + Christie masterplan will be the subject of a full planning application later in the year, in tandem with site clearance, with construction expected to begin in 2025."
https://www.wheatleyhomes-glasgow.com/about-us/regeneration/wyndford
The unavoidable money supply expansion it causes is at the very core of all sustainability issues. In fact it is the deliberately invisible elephant in the room. So shocking that it can't even be looked as we see here.
Respectfully, please research this before continuing your tangent as my original point concerned the article's sustainability focus, not capitalism vs. communism.
I’m talking about money systems not economic or banking systems in terms of making things sustainable as per article topic.
If you spent five minutes looking up what I’ve said rather than conducting this student debate with yourself about capitalism vs communism etc you would start to maybe see the point.
It’s not to do with banks or economic systems it’s to do with how our money supply is created and the inextricable link between debt-based money and the never ending expanding consumerism that money system necessitates.
Everything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
There's always the option to hand wring and use that as an excuse for inactivity. We can always point to china's expansion of coal and how insignificant the individuals effort is. But the fact is, if we all make more informed decisions we can start to turn the dial.
I'd rather look at the glass and say there is still half a pint to go than worry about the half that's gone.
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There has been a huge over focus on this fetish about ‘zero carbon’ during the use of a buildings. Rarely is there a proper accounting for the before during and after of the construction. This especially so when demolishing old buildings and building new carbon intensive short life buildings that will not last long.
Also the environmental and carbon cost of the machines that generate the electricity, store and distribute it would need to be taken into account as well if this was to ever be true calculation.
The resource depletion, unnecessary scarcity, consequent wars and very destructive pollution and land ruination from all this are probably at least as worrying as climate change itself.
All of these virtuous moves will mean exactly nothing unless we have the guts to examine and completely reform our debt based money system.
Such an ever expanding money system will always lead to greater consumption year by year. It’s just a case here of the style of consumption changing a little bit nothing more.
The core problem remains unsolved.