Momentum behind the idea of “climate hushing” has been growing over the past year. Last September, a think tank founded by centrist Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson released a poll of voters in battleground states, concluding: “How to talk about climate change: Don’t.”
The most recent Climate Change in the American Mind survey, run in April by Yale University and George Mason University, found that 58 percent of registered voters would prefer a candidate for public office who supports action on global warming. The same percentage believed that developing clean energy sources should be a priority for the president and Congress.
“It’s very clear that the 2024 election was not a referendum on climate change,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, who notes that neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump made it a focus in their campaigns.
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The UK concrete sector’s new circular economy in construction plan anchors a shift toward whole life carbon assessment as the benchmark for sustainable construction. By tracking both embodied carbon and operational performance, the industry aims to reduce the carbon footprint of construction and create low carbon building envelopes that support net zero carbon buildings. This initiative promotes circular construction strategies such as end-of-life reuse in construction, resource efficiency in construction, and the adoption of low embodied carbon materials to drive carbon footprint reduction across the supply chain. It signals the embedding of life cycle thinking in construction, where life cycle cost and building lifecycle performance become integral to design and procurement.
Revised BREEAM guidance, including updates anticipated in BREEAM V7, is intensifying scrutiny of climate resilience and environmental sustainability in construction. The integration of whole life carbon targets and eco-design for buildings aligns with the UK government’s commitment to adapt for 2°C of warming by 2050. Treating adaptation as a compliance requirement ensures that sustainable building practices are embedded within green construction codes rather than appended to them. Lifecycle assessment is now viewed as essential to ensuring net zero whole life carbon outcomes.
Urgency has also grown on the social side of sustainable building design. Rising heat mortality across vulnerable housing stock highlights the health imperative for energy-efficient buildings and equitable eco-friendly construction standards. Retrofit projects focused on insulation, passive cooling and low carbon design now contribute to both social resilience and decarbonising the built environment. At the same time, partnerships between public, private and philanthropic sectors are demonstrating how sustainable urban development can regenerate industrial zones into low carbon construction materials hubs and green infrastructure corridors that support carbon neutral construction.
Across all fronts, sustainable design has moved from concept to criterion: sustainability is now measured in tonnes of carbon, not words.
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