Rows of worshippers, some with their faces raised toward the sky, others with their heads bowed, prayed for rain at a mosque in Tehran earlier this month. Theirs is an increasingly desperate plea. The city is grappling with a water crisis so severe the Iranian president has suggested people may need to evacuate. The weeks tick by, still the rains don't arrive.
There are fears water may run out completely in this vast, bustling city, whose metropolitan area is home to around 15 million people. Iran, a mostly semi-arid country, is no stranger to water shortages, but rarely have they affected Tehran, home to most of the country's rich and powerful.
The roots of Iran's water woes echo those in many other parts of the world: decades of over-extraction; aging, leaky infrastructure; a proliferation of dams erected across rivers; mismanagement; accusations of corruption. Through it all runs the thread of climate change, driving hotter, drier weather, meaning year after year, dried-out reservoirs are not replenished.
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Sustainable construction is shifting from rhetoric to rigorous evaluation of place, purpose, and impact. Developers in water‑stressed regions are prioritising compact, low carbon building forms grounded in environmental sustainability in construction, aligning land‑use with watershed management and climate resilience. In India, repeated landslide damage has underscored the cost of neglecting hydrology and slope stability, reinforcing the role of sustainable building design rooted in life cycle thinking in construction and local conditions.
Across the sector, high‑performance affordable housing and corporate campuses are setting new benchmarks for sustainable building practices. Whole life carbon assessment and lifecycle assessment are emerging as essential tools for comparing retrofit versus new‑build decisions, directing focus to embodied carbon, embodied carbon in materials and end‑of‑life reuse in construction.
The scrutiny of the carbon footprint of construction and life cycle cost metrics is steering clients toward low embodied carbon materials, energy‑efficient buildings and renewable building materials. Corporate commitments to net zero carbon and net zero whole life carbon are driving adoption of eco‑design for buildings and low carbon design frameworks informed by BREEAM and BREEAM v7 standards.
Circular economy in construction principles are shaping specifications that favour circular construction strategies, green building materials and sustainable material specification to minimise waste and maximise resource efficiency in construction. Equity and resilience now define sustainable urban development. Communities engaged in green infrastructure planning and carbon neutral construction are finding that social outcomes and trust can accelerate delivery and reduce the environmental impact of construction.
Practitioners are integrating whole life carbon data, environmental product declarations (EPDs) and building lifecycle performance indicators alongside cost and quality, embedding sustainable design and green construction values at every scale. The global agenda for decarbonising the built environment is moving from aspiration to measurable specification, signalling a decisive turn toward low‑impact construction that balances performance, affordability and long‑term sustainability.
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