As part of their effort to make Paris 2024 the “most responsible and sustainable games in history,” organizers are building something that’s meant to last.
Instead of rooming in apartments tailor-made for them, athletes in the Olympic Village this summer will be living in what will become someone else’s home or workplace. The hope is that the project will provide a model to alleviate a housing crisis in the French capital, where rising interest rates, surging prices and a supply crunch have made it harder than ever to buy or rent a home.
Organizers are also running a handful of experiments to see if new green technologies and construction methods are viable in the real world. The human-caused climate crisis has made heat waves more frequent and intense, and they are starting earlier in the year in many parts of the world.
The most scrutinized innovation will likely be the geothermal cooling system, as athletes in Paris could face the same level of sweltering heat and humidity that broiled Tokyo during the Summer Olympics there three years ago.
Read more at the link in @CNN’s bio.
📸: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Joshua Berlinger/CNN
Sustainable construction is entering a more demanding phase, with policy, energy markets and climate risk pushing the sector towards net zero whole life carbon rather than narrow operational efficiency. Calls for a UK 2035 electrification target reinforce the need for sustainable building design based on heat pumps, rooftop solar, batteries, smart controls and fabric upgrades.
Time-of-use power pricing will reward energy-efficient buildings that manage flexible demand, on-site storage and peak-load exposure, making low carbon design central to building lifecycle performance and life cycle cost.
Global forecasts for 4,800GW of new renewable capacity by 2035 strengthen the commercial case for net zero carbon buildings and low carbon building strategies. Cheaper clean technologies, led by China’s export scale, could accelerate green construction and eco-design for buildings, provided developers also address embodied carbon, embodied carbon in materials and the carbon footprint of construction.
Whole life carbon assessment, lifecycle assessment and environmental product declarations (EPDs) are becoming essential tools for sustainable material specification, low embodied carbon materials and credible carbon footprint reduction.
Climate resilience is now inseparable from environmental sustainability in construction. The completion of flood defences at Severn Stoke shows how green infrastructure and public works must protect homes, businesses and critical assets from risks already locked in. A sustainable design approach must combine net zero carbon, circular economy in construction, resource efficiency in construction, end-of-life reuse in construction and circular construction strategies. Standards such as BREEAM and BREEAM v7 will be judged by their ability to support decarbonising the built environment, improve the life cycle cost of assets and prove that sustainable building practices can deliver durable, insurable and genuinely low-impact construction.
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