Dr Mila Duncheva, business development manager, at Stora Enso looks at sustainable construction.
The world’s urban population is on the rise. In 2018 the percentage of people living in urban areas stood at 55% of the world’s population, but that figure is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. With that change comes an array of opportunities for developers, architects, construction companies and investors to build the infrastructure needed to support that urban population growth. However, there is an elephant in the room in the form of the environmental impact of this coming infrastructure boom.
The World Green Building Council puts the built environment responsible for nearly 40% of energy related carbon emissions worldwide. Simultaneously, people are living longer, with the first person to live to be 150 most likely already born. Those people require more healthcare assets to be built in addition to housing, and are living increasingly digital lives requiring more digital infrastructure. This triple effect puts the equivalent multiple of pressure on our shared resources. Therefore, we need to ensure urbanisation takes place in a more sustainable way, which means creating or adapting buildings to be as carbon efficient as possible.
Progress to more sustainable urban environments is achievable, but it requires additional investment. How can the industry increase the appeal of newer and more sustainable forms of construction to investors used to conventional materials such as concrete?
Information underload
One of the major barriers to more environmentally smart investments is an inability to ascertain whether that investment is going to be the more sustainable option, and to what extent it can have a positive impact, which comes from a lack of information. In 2023, a BNP Paribas poll of investors including asset owners and private equity groups found over 70% reported “inconsistent and incomplete” data as the largest obstacle to investing according to environmental, social and governance principles.
That data has historically been unavailable in the construction industry because of the difficulty in establishing the carbon impact of different materials and practices. This is particularly true for the hard to measure embodied carbon emissions, which take into account raw materials as well as the manufacturing process.
That is beginning to change with the introduction of tools to provide accurate assessments of environmental impact as well as a new regulatory framework to incentivise and guide that reporting.
Laying down the law
Countries such as France, Denmark, and the Netherlands have been pioneers in driving the regulation of operational and embodied carbon, which has translated into progress at the EU level. Since May 2024, the EU’s revamped Energy Performance of Buildings Directive has been a vital driving force in two significant ways. The first is the emphasis the directive places on retrofitting existing buildings to make them more energy efficient.
The second important element of the directive is that it takes embodied carbon into account – vital when half of all buildings that will be around in 2050 have yet to be built. The directive mandates EU member states to require the calculation and disclosure of building emissions starting in 2028 for large new buildings and extending in 2030 to all new buildings. Also in 2030, member states are to place limits on those building emissions. These steps will act as a catalyst across the bloc and beyond to better track the environmental impact of construction projects.
But it’s no good having the obligation to report embodied emissions without the means to do it. This is where a carbon calculator comes in.
Counting the cost of carbon
One of the barriers to investment is the ability to accurately assess risk and potential reward. When it comes to construction, we can relatively easily measure the positive impact of using sustainable materials versus conventional ones. In the case of Stora Enso’s recently opened head office in Helsinki, replacing conventional concrete with mass timber reduced before-use CO2 emissions by 35%. But what about embodied emissions? In other words, what is the up-front emissions impact that we need to understand to make informed investment decisions?
Construction firms, developers, architects and any other interested project stakeholders can make use of carbon calculators, such as the one offered by Stora Enso, to understand the emissions associated with the full supply chain, including the manufacture of products and the transport of those products to a building site. Stakeholders should also seek out Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), which Stora Enso uses to inform the carbon calculator, as those contain details about the environmental impact of reuse and recycling scenarios. This helps to paint a detailed picture of the positive outcomes sustainable construction practices can have.
There are the added benefits of certain renewable materials that can make a further dent in CO2 traditionally linked to the built environment. Take mass timber as an example. In addition to its low carbon emissions during manufacturing, wood stores CO2 – the only commercially available structural material to do so. In the case of Stora Enso’s head office, the wooden elements of the building contain 6,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide that is intended to remain there for at least 100 years. Therefore, using mass timber supplies buildings with a sustainability surplus and provides assurances that investment in assets built with this material will serve to support a significant impact on cutting carbon emissions.
An agenda for low carbon growth
The world needs more structures to cope with the trends of urbanisation, ageing, and digitalisation, whether those are houses, hospitals or data centres. We now have the tools to track the total environmental impact of mass timber construction and demonstrate its ability to support sustainable economic growth. This is a major step to maintain that momentum in sustainable construction and unlock the capital we need to revolutionise the future of our built environment.