This month’s Smart Infrastructure Blog, by Dr Heleni Pantelidou, Associate Director at Arup, civil engineer and champion of sustainable development and decarbonisation of the built environment, calls for new market mechanisms to enable reversing built environment degradation to reduce carbon, increase resilience and sustain human health and wellbeing.
The blog is the third in the CSIC series of Smart Infrastructure Blogs highlighting the themes and pressing policy challenges discussed at the recent Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) and Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy (CPIP) hosted UK-US workshop ‘Funding, Financing & Emerging Technologies in Infrastructure to Improve Resilience, Sustainability and Universal Access’. The report from the workshop will be published and shared later this year.
The blog, titled ‘Accelerating decarbonisation – winning the race to a net zero carbon future’ opens reflecting on a comment made by Eoin Reeves, Associate Professor in Economics at University of Limerick, during his workshop presentation: “emphasis has always been on infrastructure deficits in terms of investment required to keep up with economic development. That debate has now shifted – it is no longer about gaps, but about the huge challenges of both mitigating and adapting to climate change.”
While increasing global resilience is necessary, it is not enough on its own. The blog calls for action to avoid irreversible environmental degradation: “we need to fundamentally change the way our societies and economies function; we need to transition from our carbon-and resource-profligate ways to a net zero carbon-compatible future”.
Highlighting the problem, Dr Pantelidou writes: “We, engineers across the world, are trained to solve complex problems for the benefit of society – but we have done so at the expense of nature. We have created a built environment that is highly carbon emitting and has locked in high carbon behaviours. In the new paradigm, the complex systems of buildings and infrastructure that we work with must evolve to be fit for a net zero carbon future.”
• Read the full Smart Infrastructure Blog ‘‘Accelerating decarbonisation – winning the race to a net zero carbon future’ by Dr Heleni Pantelidou here.