When we succeed in delivering a sustainable project, we succeed in combining carbon-light design with the building user’s needs. With the climate emergency showing no signs of abating, we’re trying to make the transition into ‘green living’ almost seamless, and hopefully attractive. We think this means adapting our eco-knowledge of building performance to serve daily behaviours, nudging and enabling users to consume fewer resources.

Attitudes to the Green Agenda

DEFRA’s Environmental Sustainability Report is a great resource for understanding barriers to participation in the green agenda. While their research takes in sustainable behaviour in all corners of life, their extensive interviews are helpful for visualising the motives or obstacles to participating in being a ‘green consumer’. For an architect, this translates to the underlying agenda of our clients.

By comparing the mindsets of individuals, DEFRA can form categories of trends and behaviours, plotting them on charts according to ‘ability to act’ and ‘willingness to act’.

Here, the research plots privilege (or access to resources) against motivation (or inclination to use resources), simplifying their findings into seven key attitudes to the green agenda:

DEFRA then go a step further, to consider these seven types on a sliding scale of their ‘ability to do more’. This leads to specific suggestions for ways to engage, encourage or enable a ‘consumer’ (or building user). Again, these three tiers of engagement correspond to our experience of architectural engagement:

• Able & Willing
  Visibly engaged, pro-active and demanding change
• Able but Un-Willing
  Aware but inactive, perceived & real barriers are greater than perceived gains
• Disengaged
  Either unaware, disenfranchised, excluded or disinterested

Willing & Unable 

As we plotted our project types on this chart, we noticed a few projects do not fit into one of the three categories. In fact, they sit together under the umbrella of “I’d like to do more… but”; we’re therefore adding a group called
‘Willing & Un-Able’.

Cost

The expectation of a high up-front cost for a high-performance building is enough to dissuade, even when compared with reduced future running costs

Solution: comparison with similar project types to demonstrate value of additions and scope of savings / efficiencies. Integrate sustainable content into specification, rather than treating as ‘extra over’. Assistance for seeking grants / funding for sustainable works. Retrofitting at scale to create economies.

Awareness

Unsure how to start thinking ‘green’ or best approach for each project, assume project is ‘too small to make a difference’, client lack of experience in building.

Solution: Carbon Literacy engagement, ways to measure quality of environment and value of work, comparison projects, toolbox talks, widespread Retrofit training.

Breaking Down the Big Picture 

By helping us to understand the causes of green inertia, DEFRA’s methods reveal howe we – a small practice – can make more opportunities for action. It is evident that the financial bottom line is rarely the sole motivator for decision making – we can catalyse action by engaging with more subtle agendas.

Specifically with housing projects, recognising the growing demand for low-carbon, high efficiency housing is key to breaking the eco-stalemate in retrofit and new build homes. Even after a year of home working, many of us still live in homes that are too dark, cold or damp. Normalising end-user involvement in setting a building’s design brief is key to folding sustainability into every level of a project’s inception, guiding private sector knowledge and dispelling myths around the costs and risks of green building.