I’m getting this down while it is fresh in my mind following a planning conversation with Will Arnold this morning for our Net Zero Structural Design course. In the final session of this course we are helping participants think about how to weigh up carbon with other wider sustainability considerations.
In my post earlier this morning I was reflecting on how focusing on a system’s resilience can enhance its restorative powers. My angle then, from a design perspective, was thinking about how we can shift the design brief from designing objects or outputs to designing resilience. Now I am thinking from a different angle: how we test for resilience, and how this relates to tests for carbon footprint.
Making the qualitative quantitative
Will told me something I didn’t realise: that accompanying all of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal is a series of metrics for measurement of success. So for instance, goal ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ is measured by number of deaths attributed to cities being unsafe.
Looking through how each of these qualitative goals is measured by quantitative metrics I think is a useful exercise especially if you are more used to be dealing with the qualitative constraints. However, it strikes me that this measure, like many of the others are measures of the output of the system – what it does, but not necessarily what it is going to do.
Aside: lead and lag indicators
An important principle of dealing with complex systems is to observe before you intervene. ‘Lag indicators’ are the easiest way to see how a system is behaving – it tells us what is doing, or what it has done. But from a design principle, we are also interested in what it is going to do, and what the impacts of our design ideas might be. For these we need ‘lead indicators, ones that give us a clue as to what is likely to happen.
Embodied carbon calculations are a lead indicator. Interestingly, we rarely capture the actual embodied carbon or operational carbon of a project or system, although that is changing. That would be the lag indicator.
Measures of behaviour versus measures of structure
Carbon is a measure of system behaviour. It is how much carbon dioxide is produced when a project is built, used and taken down again. Resilience is a quality of the system, related to the nature, variety, mechanism and redundancy of feedback loops.
One way to get a lead indicator on resilience could be to count the number and variety of feedback loops in a system and to see how the proposed intervention affects these. This would give us a lead indicator on resilience, which would hopefully (and with later verification) predict the behavioural outputs that would be shown by lag indicators.
Assessing resilience in this way I see as a measure of structure rather than behaviour.
The trouble with starting with carbon
When we are comparing carbon footprint with, say, measures of community resilience, we are trying to compare things from two different formal classes. (Not apples versus pairs, but apples versus biodiversity.)
The engineering community is rightly focused on reducing carbon. We produce a lot of it and it is easy to count. But it is an output of the system. When we start to think about things like resilience, biodiversity, equity and justice we are talking about the system structure. I have a strong feeling that the output carbon problem we have emerges as a result of systemic structural failure.
We often try to deal with both things like resilience (system structure) and carbon footprint (system output) on a single project. But comparing and playing the two off against each other is like playing off causes and effects. It’s like an organisation struggling with debts deciding on a range of money saving strategies, and then deciding not to invest in restructuring their debt to reduce interest.
What to do differently
For the people attending our net-zero structural design course, I recognise that the primary motivation of this course is thinking about reducing carbon in our designs.
When it comes to comparing options to reduce carbon versus other more system structural considerations, I think it is useful to simply recognise that these are different classes of things to compare.
And where possible, look at the project as a wider system and try to see what structures of the system are causing so much carbon to be generated, and to see where – if possible – a change can be made at system structure level that both serves to, say, increase system resilience, at the same time as reducing the carbon output of the project.
Will, what do you reckon?
Will
An interesting challenge Oli, and perhaps one that’s similar to other discussions around value that are had. Clients often put a price on value as part of setting a project budget. Some will want to spend more per square metre as they believe that the return on that investment will add something worth having. This is value for money.
We now need to work out how to help clients navigate ‘value for carbon’. Of course we have the dual problem here of carbon still not being limited/taxed (meaning you can emit as much as you choose), and the fact that values such as ‘community resilience’ sit on a scale much broader than values such as ‘reception space beauty’.
Are we asking clients to be too altruistic to both reduce their emissions AND increase the standard of living for everyone around them?