That puts Fraser Place and the handful of similar buildings in Asia at the center of today’s climate debate. Asia’s growing demand for energy is the main driver of $100-per-barrel oil, and makes it the hottest market for biofuels that threaten food supplies. Thanks to its metastasizing power grids, which rely mainly on coal-fired plants using technology from the 1950s, it is also the fastest-growing contributor to the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming. Clearly, China and India need cleaner power plants, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the fastest, cheapest way to reduce emissions is to build more energy-efficient cities, using proven green technologies. “Success in confronting climate change depends very heavily on how we house Asia,” says Daniel Esty, Yale University environmental-law professor and coauthor of “Green to Gold.” “This is a huge challenge but also a huge opportunity.”
Why Asia? Because breakneck economic growth and the region’s still-huge rural population make it the epicenter of urbanization in the 21st century. The challenge (as is so often the case in the region) lies in not repeating the West’s developmental missteps. Rural-urban migration now lands millions of Asians a year in apartments replete with TVs, refrigerators and air conditioning. Every day more of them obtain the ultimate urban accessory: the automobile. If current patterns persist, by 2020 China alone will import half the world’s coal, a fifth of its oil and will have 158 million cars on its roadways compared with just 30 million today.
The alternative: apply existing green building techniques—most of which are neither high tech nor costly—to grow healthier Asian cities. Doing so, most experts concur, could yield urban areas that consume 30 to 50 percent less energy than conventional cities, for a small additional construction cost. At a recent conference on sustainable building in Singapore, Ch? Wall, former chairman of the Australia-based World Green Building Council, said that “we have to recalibrate our thinking” about cities as smog-spewing symbols of environmental degradation. Cities, he argues, can be efficient, sustainable environments, especially when created based on sound ecological practices. They put people in closer proximity to their work, generate less energy-intensive economic growth and lend themselves to mass transportation. “The building sector is where the biggest opportunities lie,” he says.
Today buildings account for roughly half of all energy consumption globally, and transport gobbles up an additional quarter. Both are rising in percentage terms (in contrast to industrial power use, which is falling) due to urbanization. Still, cities are potentially big energy savers. A recent study in The McKinsey Quarterly reviewed all the realistic ways of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, and found that 75 percent of the potential reductions either would result from broader use of proven technologies (insulation for buildings and hybrid technology for cars) or are not technology related (a well-designed building can save a lot of energy simply by the way it sits on the site, captures natural light and garners rainwater). It also found that green building is one of the cheapest ways to cut greenhouse emissions (and “clean coal” technologies are among the most expensive). Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that buildings account for almost half of all greenhouse-gas emissions; green-building advocates say better design and construction could cut this in half. “It is better to reduce demand through making buildings more energy-efficient than it is to try and ‘solve’ the clean-energy problem,” says Jason Hainline, whose firm, EMSI, consulted on Fraser Place. “The first step always is to reduce demand through design. And in essence, that’s free.”
The global green-building boom owes much to the nation that refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and still carries a well-deserved reputation for resource gluttony, the United States. In Asia the clearest sign of American influence is the growing cache of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) awards, granted since 1998 by the U.S. Green Building Council. The system grades buildings for factors like indoor environmental quality, resource use and consumption of energy and water, and awards certifications that can raise the market value of buildings by up to 10 percent. “The [U.S.] Green Building Council’s promotions have been very influential,” says K. S. Wong, vice chairman of Hong Kong’s equivalent body. “In terms of market perception, LEED is really seen as the global standard.”
Today India is arguably the Asian nation most enthusiastic about using old technology to find new energy savings. In some sense the green-building tradition goes back to Mahatma Gandhi, who once built his own house from wattle (woven wooden strands) and daub (a mixture of earth, cattle dung and straw). Inspired by that simple esthetic, visionary British-born architect Laurie Baker, a naturalized Indian who first landed in 1945, designed structures that could be built affordably from local materials, with scooped roofs and perforated walls to capture breezes. “The trend in India in the 1960s and 1970s was climate-sensitive, naturally cooled and very local,” says Abhin Alimchandani, director of architecture at STUP consultants in Mumbai, a prominent green designer. “Those buildings would [score] very well under the LEED system.”
Since 2003, some 30 Indian projects have won LEED certification, according to the Indian Green Building Council. They include India’s first green airport, now nearing completion in Hyderabad, as well as prominent corporate headquarters in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore and a city-size special economic zone called Blue Ridge in Pune. “Five times as many are now in the pipeline,” says Alimchandani, and by 2010 the council hopes to have a thousand green projects underway nationwide. “There is a huge requirement for LEED-accredited professionals,” IGBC chairman Prem C. Jain told the Deccan Herald in September. “In fact, we need an army to overlook the commissioning, simulation and operations of these buildings.”
Singapore’s most ambitious green project stands out for targeting the mass market. Called Eco Precinct, the 712-unit residential complex incorporates ecofriendly innovations into affordable, efficient flats more notable for their underlying design logic than for high-tech wizardry. “It is not our mandate to do cutting-edge,” says Johnny Wong of the city’s Housing Development Board unapologetically. Instead, Eco Precinct gets the basics right. Solar heat is absorbed on insulated “cool walls,” green roofs and a tree-shaded Eco-Deck that covers the car park. Windows face the north-south axis to avoid morning or evening glare, while the thin towers maximize air flow-through. Solar cells power lights in common areas and the capture of rainwater irrigates dense landscaping that could cut outside temperatures at the complex by up to four degrees Celsius. The project is already 80 percent sold and represents about a third of all public housing to be built in the city-state in 2009.
Eco Precinct is a case study in adapting to local conditions. Its flats aren’t double-glazed, tightly sealed units like those favored in colder climes, because in the tropics this type of design tends to encourage air-conditioning use. The project’s green roof was another area of focus. Plant and soil mixes favored in temperate climates would require irrigation and could breed deadly mosquitoes, HDB experiments concluded. So experts at the National University of Singapore and the city’s parks service were called upon to select appropriate plants. And instead of soil, pebble-size ceramic shards keep roots from rotting and water from pooling. Eco Precinct will cost 5 to 8 percent more to build than conventional public housing, says Wong, and it’s “too early to tell how much energy we will save.”
The challenge ahead—for Asia and the world—is to move beyond the green-building beachhead by making key elements in today’s experimental buildings tomorrow’s norm. The trends are encouraging. The number of projects seeing green certifications (by LEED and others) is increasing virtually everywhere, albeit from a low baseline; leading corporations see the PR advantage to having LEED-certified headquarters, and developers are discovering that resource-efficient buildings command premiums on the market (for sale or lease) that outweigh additional building costs. Perhaps the best barometer is that the cost of noncompliance is rising. “New non-green buildings face early obsolescence,” forecasts Wall.
More important to the big picture, governments are reviewing outdated building codes in light of the impact green buildings have on climate change. Hong Kong’s top leader hinted in his recent annual policy address that tougher efficiency standards are on the way. Singapore has declared its lowest Green Mark certification the minimum standard for all new construction. And this month China sent a delegation from the powerful construction ministry to the USGBC’s annual Green Build convention in Chicago, where members presented a rating and certification system under development in Beijing as part of a strategy to reduce energy use and carbon emissions in 2010 to 1990 levels. “This could get beyond the handful of sample projects,” says Hainline. “With China’s goal of becoming a world leader they have the ability to make things happen not only by reversing their own environmental path but by setting the example for others.”
Asia would do well to emulate the U.K.’s quest for sustainability. The government has already begun to phase in building regulations that aim to render all new homes built after 2016 carbon-neutral. Its Code for Sustainable Homes sets standards for water use, waste, building materials and energy consumption that will escalate three times over the next nine years as the zeroemission deadline approaches. “This is an excellent example of a long-term legislative framework,” says Nigel Banks, a consultant at the environmental firm Faber Maunsell. “It has allowed developers to test ideas on a small scale [and] invest in new technologies with the knowledge that their investments will be rewarded.”
The benefits of applying similar standards on a global scale are obvious, and the risks of not doing so extreme. Old-style buildings contribute heavily to global warming but new ones needn’t. And with the bulk of new urbanization set to take place in Asia, it is there that greenhouse-gas emissions—and thereby global warming—can be contained in the next decade or two and even reversed in the longer term. Or not. Fraser Place may not look all that special, but much is riding on what it represents.
