ONE UN - Building low-carbon housing - from National Policy to Local Action (WUF13)

So we have all the speakers here.
Maybe I would like to invite all the speakers here.
Ambassador António.
Mr.
Lubner head of housing projects out of CCNA department for Urban Development Building Housing Berlin, Germany.
How are you doing? Surviving.
Good.
Mr.
Lugner, thank you so much for coming.
Mr.
Shankar Dispane, Chief Investment and Planning Office of Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority, India.
Pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining.
Again, to meet.
It's my pleasure also to invite my very good colleagues, Michael Sales, who is a is Environmental Affairs Officer with UNIC Cities Unit, and Leah Bernardo, Program Office habitat as the climate team.
Thank you so much, Leah.
Also, finding time with such a busy woof.
We really appreciate coming.
With this, we would like to in this very exciting world urban forum, we are discussing how we make our homes safe, resilient, and therefore, this event also is looking a lot into the building component, how we build and how we refurbish our homes and how we work between the national and local government together because, you know, as also it was already mentioned so many times at the opening and in many, many events, the role of subnational governments is very, very important in accelerating building and refurbishing with all the housing which is being built, you know, towards the next, um, uh, next many, many years.
And, of course, we at the Global Alliance Building Construction, which was established at COP 21 at the climate conference which was held in Paris in 2021, I in 2015 Cop 21.
So today we have the Global Alliance for Building Construction with 396 members, including 70 countries.
And global alliance include both national and sub national governments looking altogether towards a zero emission efficient and resilient buildings and construction sector.
And given the importance of cities and regional governments in implementation of buildings policies and regulations, but also bringing lots of knowledge and innovation on ground into this process, the Global Alliance for Building Construction established sub national action group in 2024 to accelerate the local solutions to support this decarbonization of the built environment in cities, So through this subnational action group, which is led by Habitat.
So with Leah we are two co chairs of this action group, but also by Z and WI, who is one of the co organizer of this event as well, we are really working to strengthen this multi level governance, and today is the event really to discuss how we can work together to translate all the building policies which are established at the national level to the local level.
And one very important of very important activities, just to mention that there is a CAMP, which is, and I hope earlier you will mention it maybe also your presentation to speak a bit more about CAMP as a very important arrangement of promoting multi level governance in more general on climate policies between national and local governments on climate, on buildings, but also on other sectors.
And there is also up accelerator, which this international group is working with the World Resource Institute, which is one of the organizers of this important event.
Um So this is a bit on this coalition of high ambition, multi level partnership, but we would like really to give opportunity for speakers to speak about it and habitat could probably look at it in more details.
But also to mention that World Resource Institute as our very important partner under the global ABC has actually worked on many very concrete projects to implement it in Colombia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda.
So there is quite a number of the projects which have been implemented.
And of course, there is also a very big project in Kenya working through disease.
One of the important activities under the Global ABC is Zero Emissions and Resilient Building Accelerator, which is a global initiative of the Global Alliance for Building and Construction, which is implemented together with the World Resource Institute C 40 and A two Coalition.
So this is a very important tool for us to work together to promote this national sub national collaboration to accelerate buildings decarbonization and increase their resilience.
And so that end, it was already established in Colombia and in Kenya.
The axillator is engaging the national governments and at least one sub national governments and an expert advisory group is created for a country in order to design a joint work plan for the high impact multi level action.
I and the expert advisory group is, I think, very important vehicle for bringing all the organizations together and working on it together.
So I would probably continue speaking about more of the very concrete technical issues on the latest stage because I really am so much looking forward into giving flow to a our colleagues.
With this, I would like to give hello to António Francisco Da Costa Silanto, who is the Chief International advisor with the Office of the Ministry of City of Brazil and also is a co chair of the Intergonmental Committee on Buildings and Climate.
Thank you very much, Cona.
First and foremost, thank you for the invitation.
Really happy to share this table with so important experts on a subject that is very dear and clear to Brazil.
Brazil joined Global ABC and IFS and the uh, joined and spearheaded the effort of the ICBC on the understanding that decarbonizing the built environment is key to achieve the sustainable goals that we want to achieve, not only under the UNFCCC and the commitments that we have undertaken, but also within the whole, um, Agenda 2030 and also the New Urban Agenda objectives.
So clearly, there is an interlink in this global commitments and our own national commitments.
Brazil is also, by the way, co chair, co president of CHAMP.
Champions the coalition on high ambition on multi level partnership that was launched in Dubai in Cop 28, and we have put a lot of effort in order to organize it in a way that would allow us to really make sense of what multilevel governance is for us.
Finally, I think it is worth noting that our own most recent NDC, uh, clearly highlights what we call in Brazil, climate federalism, which means that the commitment of a federal country like Brazil with their states and particularly with the municipalities, and we have 5,600 of them in a territory that's fairly large, we work with them.
That being said, I think it is worth now concentrating on a couple of minutes on what we are trying to do actually, and we're trying to do a couple of things.
Building codes in Brazil are municipal responsibility.
Therefore, as you can imagine, with 5,600 municipalities scattered over more than seven or eight different biomes, ten or 12 different climate, contexts and from very dense metropolitan areas in the coastline to very scattered cities in the rest of the country, creating rules that would allow you to organize the built environment in a way that would move forward the agenda of low carbon is not exactly simple.
That being said, What we are trying to look at is ways in which we can stimulate both industry and local governments to adopt a number of criterias that would move the needle forward in a significant way.
The first one is we're trying to create at least some common understanding of what built codes should be.
We won't impose a national building code because it doesn't make any sense to do that in Brazil, bearing in mind the regional and local differences.
But yes, it makes sense to at least create a pattern that would allow municipalities to look into modernizing their systems, creating less bureaucracy, less paperwork, adopting a number of technological solutions that would allow us to accelerate the authorization of buildings.
That's the first idea.
The second idea is through the Ministry of Energy and Mining, we have put standards of emissions for new buildings.
Obviously, we won't change the old buildings, but we are trying to make sure that new buildings are energy efficient.
Finally, particularly in terms of credit for real estate new buildings, we are building a carbon calculator.
The idea is that banks, particularly public banks that finance and fund construction, will adopt this carbon calculator to evaluate projects at the paper level, at the project level, to understand what is the potential emissions, how we can actually adopt different solutions and different ways of approaching the building in order to make sure that the carbon emissions are lower.
Obviously, those tasks are in process.
I think what we are trying to do, and I think this is something that's particularly relevant of our using ICBC and CAM is using these two international platforms as, let's say, standards as objectives to attain from the local and national government.
So the ICBC gives us the similar, particularly the So Declaration, to have a standard that we should aim at, and hopefully we will start an exercise to understand what else can we do to organize all the agendas from different ministries and different agencies to make sure that we move forward in the same direction.
We have other efforts ongoing, particularly from the Ministry of Environment and from the Ministry of Science and Technology.
In terms of new green buildings, what we are hoping to do is align expectations from different agencies, rules from different agencies into one sole objective.
I think the missing link, and I want to address this because I think it's something that we certainly could learn both from these debates and from further conversations with the international community, is how you attract the private sector and particularly the financial private sector.
To these rules.
Currently, when you discuss particularly in social housing at the local level, how to decarbonize industry usually says, Oh, it's costly.
We might want to take a look at this.
Maybe we should not speed up the rules because the rules will impact the cost level.
Obviously, although we know that's not exactly true, we need to build the argument, and I think the argument needs to be built not only at the construction industry, but particularly at the financial industry on how do you create systems to attract capital to greener, lower emission buildings and practices.
I think this is one link that's missing the other, particularly for a territory the size of Brazil and I'm particularly looking at my Indian colleague here because we share that same problem.
Scale.
How do you industrialize the building industry? Because decarbonization and industrialization of the construction industry are, I believe, clearly linked.
But in order to scale this at the territorial level in countries like Brazil or India is not exactly easy or simple and you need to figure out how you build not only your industry, but your tax code and other procedures in order to make sure that scaling up construction, industrializing construction, adopting new technologies is fast enough in order for you to make a difference.
I will leave my comments on that.
Certainly welcome the debate that we might have on the issue.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, António.
That's super useful.
What do you think for Brazil, what worked the best to you spoke about the Brazil federalism.
Finance is one of the way of bringing the local municipalities implementation.
What are the key three recipes for Brazil to push this decarbonization? I think if you're talking about doing it at the local level, I think the first task is look at what is really that you need to change at the buildings code level.
I think while we cannot unify the building codes because the Constitution won't allow and actually, it would be to a certain extent contrary to the philosophy of how the country was developed politically.
You need to empower municipalities to understand the impact of decarbonizing the built environment.
And in order to do that, I think, first and foremost is capacity building.
We are trying to build we have a platform that's called in Portuguese, it makes a lot of sense.
It's called capacges.
Sages in Portuguese is cities and capacity.
So it's like capacity to capacitate cities, and it's an online platform in which we are hoping we are going to put in a number of online courses to allow the staff of municipalities to understand what we're talking about.
We are discussing at the national level number of initiatives to simplify building codes.
Municipalities themselves can do that.
The first task is putting most of the procedures online.
Is not exactly easy and it's costly sometimes for small municipalities.
Bear in mind, we have 5,600 municipalities, very easy to do that in Rio or in So Paolo or in Blarizonte Fairly less simple in smaller cities that don't have the staff of the capacity.
So federal government needs to help.
Finally, building codes and out the built environment is not a competency of our states.
Yet states know the territory at, let's say, aggregate level.
We need to involve states into helping municipalities help us put this forward.
So it's not simple, but we'll get there.
I hope.
Thank you so much.
Well, I think I have many more questions, but I hope we will continue discussing as we are really trying to understand what really is key avenues for us to localize this kind of building sector decarbonization.
So now we will go from Brazil to subnational level in Germany.
I would like to invite La Loner who is the head unit of housing projects in O Senate Department for Urban Development Building and housing in Berlin, Germany, I would like to ask to put thank you so much.
Mr.
Loudner, you can use the green to move.
Yes, it would be great to hear from Berlin as we're moving from Venue Latin America to Europe.
But also maybe you could comment also what for you was the three strategic and, you know, ways how you can the most efficiently function at the city level and metropolitan level to decarbonize the building stock.
Yes, thank you very much.
Pro we live a little bit better world because on the national level, we have planning code, which is for all cities in Germany.
Then on the federal state level, we have the building code, which means the house and the application for that.
Berlin is not only a municipality, city, but it also is federal state, so we can combine both.
But I'd like to show you, which is also on the planning side, very important if you consider carbon dioxid reduction and climate protection.
It's supposed to be that we have in building an integrated urban development policy with different sectoral UDPs we call that, urban development plans and one of them is also the climate plan.
Um, but first of all, I have to mention that Berlin is a very growing city since almost 15 years, and you see that we have a strong increase in employment, and also on the socially insured employees, and we have students and so on.
But you see, um, a little bit down, there is the inhabitants increased by 9% and the apartments increase or the flats and dwellings are only 8%.
So we have a housing backlog.
This means that we can see here in the figures, We have increasing land price and decreasing amount of area per person, which is good for carbon dioxide.
We are struggling with the effects of growth actually.
This means, if you have not enough flats and you have an increasing number of population, you need new flats and new flats is very let's say difficult for carbon dioxid and the total emission of Berlin.
Of course, there are goals to go to zero and how to bring this together.
This is the big question we have.
One strategy is that we are going to build in the inner city area, but also we have mid size new constructions and developments from 1,000 units, flats, you can say in apartments to up to 9,000 The most of them are in the outer city because I'm responsible for half of them.
That's why I have the housing project outer city area.
Outer city area means outside this metro ring, which looks like a dog hack head, you can see in the middle of the screen.
This is the size of Paris actually.
The building from the territory from the area, it's nine times bigger and we are going to have only a double population.
We're going to have a 4 million instead of two millions.
It's also a density, question and colleagues here calculated how much carbon dioxide emissions you have if you're living in the Paris style inner city area or you'll live in the outer city areas, and this is doubled.
You see this is concerning the mobility.
And if you look, this is the public transport coverage by the subway, by the light rail, and by the tram.
And you see also difference between east and west buildings still.
So in the east building, you have the tramway and in the West building, you have more subways.
And these major housing projects are mostly concentrated on the major railway tracks.
Not all of them, unfortunately, but also this will decrease the carbon emission.
If we think about the global responsibility, you see here.
I personally worked in Ethiopia a long time ago.
If you compare the carbon emission of Ethiopia with Germany, then you will see that this kid on the left side might like to live like the kid on the right side.
But on the right side with detached single family houses, we will we won't rescue the world, so we have to find other settlement structures.
And we have other goals, as I, um, to already.
You see that one of these projects I have is a 900 dwellings.
We are built already there.
So all the energy which is needed for the maintenance for heating comes from renewable resources.
We're using the heat of a sewage line, for instance, and with a heat pump system and solar panels to do that.
And here you see our major project.
It's about 8,600 housing units in the north of Berlin.
And here we did in research how we not only operate carbon dioxide neutral such an project, but also how can we build that? Under different scenarios, the blue one is the normal scenario if we would work like the old days, and how to come to the green scenarios.
And that is one point is avoid concrete here.
So we want to substitute concrete by timber frame construction.
And we want to plant a lot of new trees.
And so this is the big issues and auto mobility, to have, we call it literally translated car poor area.
So car is not the base for transportation anymore.
So you have public transport, you have bicycles, you have pedestrians, and so on.
And I will take you to a planning workshop we had recently, we had a competition and of 12 entries and we figured out four of these entries and then developed them further and discussed, for instance, how we can concentrate the housing density on the tram stations on the future tram so that you have a very high quality public transport to convince people to use the public transport and not the car anymore, because we need a 90 percentage share of public transport if we want to reach carbon neutral neighborhoods.
Other point is using word on the modular and topologies here, the building types we call it, um and also consider that in the very beginning of planning, if we have the layout of the urban structure, the project teams have to consider this topology.
Then, of course, what you're told, we have industrialization.
This is not that new in Germany, especially not in East Germany.
We had a highly industrialized, building sector.
You might know that platenba is prefabricated slab system, but now we are going to do that with wood or timber frame, and you see some examples, and there are huge investment around Berlin.
To deliver then these modules to extend our housing stock.
That's good not only for carbon dioxide emissions of Berlin, but also for the forest, because of climate change, we have to change our deforest in the surrounding areas of Berlin and Brandenburg and bring them or change them in the kind of trees.
And this would then should be taken for construction of new settlements.
And also one idea and strategy is not only going for high tech.
We are well known for high tech solutions, but also think about low tech, and then we compare here, in this case, two identical, houses in a brick solution and also in timber frame construction, and we'll see which finally on the long run will be the best.
So thank you very much for a brief introduction in Berlin.
Thank you so much, Mr.
Logner.
This was really very, very comprehensive overview.
I think this is what you basically demonstrated to us is that this is what the global Alliance building construction we are preaching for is an integrated solution.
Because you started about the building codes, which also Brazil was showcasing, but also looking into the integrated urban energy solutions, using the renewables.
This is also we see in many cities is developing.
Use of the timber, bio materialrials, the nature based solutions, and also the low tech solutions.
I think we'll hear probably from India about this because under the Big P, we're actually also doing lots of very exciting work using.
I think this is really relevant also globally would be interesting to hear more about the living labs in any of the future events.
What you also mentioned about the urban planning, and we just had a conference in Lausan building Building and Construction Summit, and this is where we all discussed that urban planning is still kind of underused instrument.
We're kind of using it separately from the buildings, but you're really showing that you are integrating master planning in a way and decarbonization of the built environment.
So that's thank you so much.
So, uh We will definitely leave more opportunities for questions from audience after the presentation, but we would like to see, in a way, interaction of the three speakers.
With that, it's my pleasure to give floor to the next speaker, miss Shankar Dipane, who is the Chief Investment planning Office at Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority in India, Mumbai also actually organized just recently the climate Week, which was extremely successful, congratulations.
On this.
So what you demonstrate is there, so we are really looking forward to hear from you as well.
Yeah, good morning, everyone, and thank you, organizers and my fellow panelists.
Yeah.
We have something good in Mumbai.
We have a scale of Brazil and we have a public transport very close to your ambition of 90%.
I'll see, and you touched upon a point which is very near to my heart about how urban planning sit in the center of all the net zero elements which we have to tackle for the housing.
I'll just try to give a view for all my fellow colleagues and the audience here.
Is Mumbai metropolitan region is about 6,500 square kilometers area.
It houses about 25 million people, 10 million people move every day.
We have about 15 million jobs created in Mumbai metropolitan region.
We are a $150 billion economy with GDP per capita in the range of 3,500.
And most importantly, 28 is average age of the people working there, and the demographic dividend, 70% of the people are in that area.
Plus, we are the growth engine of the country.
For the only reason that we're 95% urbanized in Mumbai metropolitan region.
We are highly service dominated area jobs which are being created.
Now, with that as a contextualization, we also have a challenge, which we could say on housing.
We are about 50% to 60% of our population of Mumbayi metropolitan region doesn't have formal housing, and that's an opportunity where we see that much of the housing has to be created.
Now, when we also have a growth story of this Amritkl where India completed its 75 years of independence after 1947, and when we embark the curve to 100 years, there's a national target because we talk about what's the national policy.
We have a net zero target, we have a GDP target at a national level and an aspirational level at the state level.
So when India aspires to grow from the 4 trillion to 10 trillion in the next five years, and the state aspires to grow from $500 billion to 1 trillion economy, and when my region, who is the engine of the economic growth of the country aspires to grow from $150 billion economy to $300 billion economy, How do we do it? What are the targets? What are the growth drivers and what's the role of housing, transport, mobility, jobs, gender equality, carbon finance, climate finance, and the carbon footprint, all of these areas? Let me assure you that I'll try to connect all of this I don't have a presentation like my fellow in Berlin and you had, but let me just try to figure it out how it looks into you.
Mumbai metropolitan region is about 100 kilometers north south and 65 kilometers east west.
We have a coastal line of 100 kilometers, we have a land mass which expands on the eastern side.
We have two ports.
There are two airports and two ports in this area, and we have a third port and third airport which is coming up in the next decade.
This area of 100 kilometers, we'll have three ports and the three sea ports.
Apart from that, We have the stock exchange, which is comparable to London, Japan, and New York.
Apart from doing this, we have the headquarters of most of the commercial buildings and the financial institutions in an area called as Bandraka Complex.
I worked with MMRD for the last 30 years in the field of urban planning, regional planning, city planning, urban design, urban mobility, transit oriented development, low cost finance and geo positioning, Mumbai metropolitan region, outreaching it, attracting investment.
And the last ten years, I've been also trying to see how all of this build for development, which is the aspiration for GDP growth and the young population who wants to grow, consume energy, and also try to see that we have to be carbon neutral at a building level, at a street level, at a neighborhood level, and at a city level.
Now, these two things have to be decoupled, have to be seen in isolation, but also have to be identified that they are going to happen in the same time period.
We're focusing with the United Nations Environmental Program and GISA, KFW World Bank, and ADP which we all work.
When we work with urban mobility, we talk about blue and green infrastructure.
I'm happy to state when we look at implementation of national policies and the state targets to actually the regional level, we have a regional plan which talks about a layer of mobility plan.
We have an economic master plan, we have a climate action plan, and we have a transport action plan.
When all of these plans sit together, we actually know how do people travel and how do we actually bring the carbon footprint down with your ambition of increasing more public transport? Sure.
How do we actually see that people walk 500 to 800 meters in the last mile, first mile, and the core mile, which is Metro actually.
Around the 400 transit oriented development networks and impact c which I'm creating, how do we also solve two problems? How do we solve the problem of constructing affordable housing? How do we also solve the problem of eradication of encroachments on public spaces? Try to leverage that, create land value around the metro stations because public finance and I think the finance for the region is a very important thing when you have the aspiration of economic growth and the energy footprint coming down together.
When we simultaneously want to do it, when MMRD through the land value capture mechanism itself, puts about five to $6 billion infrastructure within Mumbai metropolitan region alone.
All other organizations like there are eight corporations and eight council.
We have about 20 urban local bodies within this 6,000 square kilometers, which again put together five to 6 billion infrastructure.
So about $10 billion infrastructure happening in this area, you could see the impact which is going to happen on the private sector, which has a land value capture and most of the construction of housing is done by them.
When we roll out the infrastructure and the land value is created and opportunities created for private sector and my friend in Brazil told me that there's a small gap.
How does the banks look at this? How does the financial institutions look at this? How do we close the gap when we tell that there's an economic apy? There's an increase in rate of return opportunity for the land value capturing, but you also have to see these add ons, which I call planning instruments or leverages to bring down carbon footprint at a building level, neighbor level, and then You don't call it an extra cost, but you call it as an incentive which is given for the ecosystem of entire housing or for that matter, infrastructure when you consider the life cycle.
It's very difficult to convince when a capital investment takes place either to a bank or through a developer that something which you do good today actually pays in the long run.
With the partnership with the United Nations Environmental Program in the Mumbai climate, which we told, we are trying to now go to two approaches.
One is the Greenfield approach where we are building two new cities in Mumbai metropolitan region, but there's a Brownfield approach.
With the Brownfield approach, we have low income housing and we have affordable housing and we have high income housing.
With UNEP, we tried to stretch the marginal ones.
What we did is we went to the societies where Amari had constructed this affordable housing.
We went to them and there were three or four climate extreme weathers which are now affecting Mumbai.
One is flood, second is heat, and hurt the wind direction.
Now, the housing is something which consumes a lot of energy if you are not doing something good at the regional level at a planning level.
So let me tell you that a good plan a good carbon footprint plan is a net neutral plan.
When executed properly at a micro level, you can actually do a lot of financial equipment savings, what you're going to get with a carbon footprint also.
It's very close integrated master planning, land use planning, urban design, mobility planning, financial planning, which all actually lead to good climate resilience and community resilience is building up.
With UNEP, just to give you an example, when we have this affordable housing stock created, even micro level details, we found that some amount of change in painting and some amount of solar roofing which has been done.
Let me tell you in India, the housing stock is constructed by developers, but there are also possibility of these cooperative societies which stay together to have the instruments under the Marsto Cooperative Society Act.
The people staying in the building or staying in the layout within the campus or the gated community can come together and take initiative, and that's what we UNEP, we try to do at an initial level.
We tried to change the pains inside the things.
We tried to do the passive passive cooling solutions within the campus, and we could convince them people that the elevators which they are using and the energy which they are using to just cool them off with the air conditioning actually brings down the micro climate by five to six degrees to make them happy.
Much better instead of cooling and paying the long electricity So actually, if we do a good modeling around the planning, architecture, aesthetics, buildings with the best global partners and the best practices, I think carbon finance is possible and you get a good cost of you get your capital returns very good if you include this portion in your return period.
Most importantly, we have to also see that we cannot actually decouple both of these things.
The aspiration of a country for GDP growth is tied up with the energy consumption because more manufacturing is real, more consumerism is going to grow.
But when we have clean energy and we have this aspiration of GDP growth coupled together with the agencies and the best practices, I think the targets are achievable at a national level.
What is achievable is only possible which we achieve at a local level.
So we have the building codes.
We have the enabling missions and the enabling vision.
But all of this actually ends down what happens at a brick level.
Actually, what we see is national policy to local action, the brick by brick building from local action achieves the national policy, and I think we'll have a better place and better world to live if we approach this way from bottoms up.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
It was very comprehensive, very inspiring.
I think you in a way summarized also this countries and cities and state presentation by saying that we actually in order to implement this decarbonization process, we don't need to be just an integrated, as Mr.
Loder mentioned as well, but also we should connect approaches of down from up down, but also bottom up.
Yes.
Only working both processes in this multi level governance, we actually can achieve achieve the impact.
I think that's very important because sometimes in multi level governance, we're looking only in a way how we transpose from the national to local level, but indeed, it's very important to look how we have these two ways communication and cooperation from both sides.
Before we go to the comments by our UN colleagues, maybe from the audience, any questions to our three brilliant speakers? Any concrete questions? Yes, please.
I think it's a panel and I was looking at the differences.
I'm Sujata Gvada from Hong Kong, Indian originally, but I'm happy to be here and I'm really impressed by all the presentations.
I was trying to look at the differences between each geographical area and the approach and differences.
One of the questions I had of Honorable sir, for Brazil, you said national building code is not a possibility because of the way Brazil is.
But at the same time, I think in India, there is a national building code, which is not completely the same needs to be followed everywhere, but actually it has some nuances that at a local level can be followed.
I think doctor Shankar allude to that later.
But I was looking at also from Berlin, you were talking about going into a little bit more higher density, also maybe not concrete but more timber construction.
Sometimes I feel like all these solutions are there in front of us.
We are just not looking at it in time.
I think I feel it's good now everybody is looking at it.
I saw doctor Shanker, even without a presentation, you almost explained it as though the presentation was there.
I want to see you're doing so much for each of the countries.
What do you think is the main challenge that you need to look at and what is the simplest solution that you can start with so that you can go to that higher level of achievement to make sure that we have We are all progressing towards net zero, a better world for everybody.
Thank you.
Attorney, what is that? Sure.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
As I was listening to both my German colleague and my Indian colleague, I couldn't miss the point that they're speaking of very complex metropolitan areas.
I was addressing a rather different subject, which is from the national government, how do you actually stimulate the local government to address and adopt certain rules.
So let me address your question from that perspective.
Um The reason why I say it is impossible for Brazil to impose a building code has to do with the constitutional arrangement that we have.
It would be legally and politically complicated for us to try to impose rules on local government.
You need to do this from a different perspective, which is a conversation bottom up rather than going down in which you actually listen to the expectations of the local governments and try to see how you work that out.
That is particularly true for small municipalities very easy to do this with San Paolo or R Rio, which are big metropolitan areas.
The second issue that we have is, I think, so you need to create a similar for mipts to do that.
Let me give you a case.
One thing that the national government does is social housing.
We finance social housing.
We finance social housing from zero social housing that we give to social housing that we actually finance, subsidize, non subsidized.
The national government does all that with funds that it has from different sources.
So we actually pay for construction companies to do the social.
There yes, we can impose rules.
So originally, we did large scale social housing.
What we have found is that they are not sustainable, that they are not only environmentally not sustainable, they are not socially sustainable.
You don't create community leagues.
So now we have requested municipalities social housing is built on land given by municipalities.
What we told municipalities is we will only build social housing in land that is within the urban area, within the transportation systems, near schools, near hospitals, near social services, that one.
Second, it has to be small, cannot be 50,000 people.
To be smaller scale projects.
And for the construction companies, we are now requiring a number of what we call climate comfort rules.
It has to have some garden, it has to have some tree, needs to be ventilated.
I don't know how to call it.
It has to have balconies.
We are Brazil, usually very hot.
Balconies give comfort.
We are trying actually, and they have to be sustainable.
We have changed the construction rules, so now we are allowing wood frame to be used because we know that's the way that we can make it sustainable.
Building fully on wood in Brazil is still complicated.
There is a couple of probably we need to rethink it, but wood frame is already something that we are trying to promote.
So these are the things that you can do, from the national government, okay? And then create a conversation and actually engage mayors.
To give you an idea, we have one mayor who is now building his fire station fully on wood, completely engineered wood is what we call it.
And so we went to this mayor and he said, Well, okay, we need to use you as, you know, a showcase of what other mayors can do.
And so those are the things that would kind of comment on what you said.
Yeah, you're really right actually.
In the circumstances of Berlin or Europe, I would say the most important thing is to convince people that sustainability and climate protection also means prosperity.
Because there's always the fear to lose prosperity.
You can see what happens in the US.
That's looking back in this great times and denying what is in front of us.
And that's why you need people they know how it could be or how it could be implemented.
I would say we know everything now.
But you need those they are convinced that is implemented and in a democratic society, you need acceptance and democratic support.
This is, I would say the most important point now, even in Germany, even in Berlin.
Yeah.
Sat.
I think what you really meant was the solutions are there, so you have to do the cherry picking of the best things available.
Let me assure that if you go to every session room which is happening up, you will find something good happening in each of the rooms and they're all talking about civilians and they're all talking about resilient cities.
But let me tell you where the challenges comes at a national level, at a metropolitan level.
It's not cherry picking of the best things happening here.
Because we as city are having an urban area is systems, and we follow systems approach and every small infrastructure, the system within itself.
We talk about water supply, we talk about sea, we talk about stormwater, we talk about roads.
We talk about urban mobility, we talk about housing, we talk about schools, blue infrastructure, green infrastructure.
When all of this is happening within the cities, there is competition as between those of them.
That's private sector, there's a public sector, there's a housing bank, and there's a state government incentive all sitting in the same geographical area.
When we put this big matrix, it becomes a big data analytical problem.
However, it's not a wicked problem.
We have to solve it because you are human beings staying there and we are all doing it for the betterment of the communities staying in the cities.
How do we approach this? At a national building code, we have it as a big document in the National Building Code, you know in India.
Sir, and is a state subject in India, so we have the only policies and guidance which come from the government of India.
We go to government of Marastra, we have a development control regulation, which is now uniform development control regulation, which happens across the Mars, all the cities, and then we come to regional level where we plan development control regulation for the entire region.
There are small incentives which are going for good construction, but let me give you some examples of how good policy and how development control regulation can be used to create housing stock for affordable housing if we provide access and infrastructure to them.
We have some incentive FI on a piece of land.
Example, this is a room of a land, which normal potential would be one.
Anybody who has this as a private land and you own the land and the normal potential is one.
What I say as a government is I give you four times the potential of this land and I give you some tax incentives for a period of ten, 15 years.
If you construct one potential of this and give me free and three potential is given to you, normal potential would be one to you, Now I add additional three.
Out of that additional three, I take one constructed tenements from you and remaining two is to balance your cost of construction for what you're doing.
If this is balancing out and it makes economic sense to do it, which is happening in Mumbai metropolitan region, we created about one lack houses which are called as housing for affordable segment created through this policy instruments.
What we do land was with the private sector.
The policy is with the government sector, we match the ambition of the state with what the private sector needs to do to create housing stock affordable housing stock, use the instrument of policy for government, make a special proposal, special parent, do it, give a tax incentive for a few years for those people who are not used to stay by paying actually good land title, to stay, pay the electricity bill, pay the water supply bill.
They're not used to.
Everything is free managed with a very low cost.
Now they're given a formal housing.
When they become to formal housing, they file as expenditure So the developer is told to make them a slowly telescopic way of making them into a tax bracket slowly, so it's initial ten in a very low and then they start doing it, and then the last ten years, what we decide to do this talk has come out good.
Now we came up with retrofitting all of this with the UNAPBQ program and be the heat exercise what we did.
We're trying to make this housing even more better for those people because throughout the life cycle, the expenditure also come down.
One is they got free housing because of the policy.
Secondly, you got the degree to life to stay.
Thirdly, the maintenance cost of the building has come down and the carbon energy footprint which the building was initially created with the best examples has also come down.
We could actually have demonstrable pilot projects.
The challenge which you asked is to scale it.
To involve the private sector, to involve the banks and don't call it as a niche era, which is an add on.
It's a design stage.
If you design a building and I understand that you are a very good urban designer, everything is on the drawing board, it comes out well, it pays in the long run.
But if you try to build something to convince the banks to make it a good IRR, and then the carbon things are added later on, retrofitting, it doesn't due to the efficiency, then it doesn't add to the scale.
My two takeaways for you is we need to think of scale, we need to think at planning stage and there are solutions available within the policy, private sector should come up.
We shake hands with private sector, things can be doubled up.
The speed is much more by implementing these policies.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I think we started this conversation, absolutely B program is still continuing.
We really hope under the global ABC we will continue this discussion.
I don't know if there is an immediate, maybe one more question in case if something really burning.
Hi.
Yeah, I think it's working.
Is it working? Yeah.
Hi, I'm Rupa Nya from Delhi.
Great sessions, really good points.
When we talk about Brazil, you said the capacity building is very important.
Bularam also talked about how we trickle down everything to bottom of the pyramid and we have to ensure that the absorption at the bottom level is extremely important.
Because as an architect and an our project manager, I face this all the time.
When we talk about sustainable buildings or green buildings, the general myth is that everyone feel it is going to cost a lot.
So the thing we kind of disperse is effective climate adaptation or mitigation need not always have cost, it need not be expensive all the time.
Simple practical solutions which are readily available to us can be as much as effective.
And like doctor Suga said, the passive cooling solutions like you orient your building correct, you have your proper shading devices, you use your glass judicially, make use of natural ventilation, use your locally available materials and low embodied carbon materials, you're half done.
And we try to disperse this as much as possible, but I think we need to aggressively do this more because the private developers or the market, they have built that green buildings, it's going to cost a lot and it's going to leave a hole in your pocket.
That is something I don't know how to solve this kind of problem, especially the thing I was talking about.
I see it a lot in the building envelope.
We talk about having a good AAC block because that will give you major energy savings.
But because initial cost wise, the CapEx for the burnt clay brick is lower, so people automatically choose that.
How do as flag bearers, how can we push this Thing and take down this narrative of green buildings costing more.
They are not looking at the life cycle or the payback period with the energy savings they have in the longer run.
How can we address this? Thanks, Rupa.
It is actually the way we look at the product.
I think if we say that the green buildings are expensive because they give less carbon footprint and number one, over a life cycle, the cost is less, nobody buys it because initial capital cost is high.
Now the second way is making it mandatory by government, then that again is an extreme step.
Where's the step in between? The step in between is who consumes those? It's not only the banks finance those, developers build that, that you and me consume that as long as there is a belongingness coming out from the communities and societies and you only buy those things which are good to you, affordable to you, and a long run it cost less to you.
It's your investment decision, which makes mandatory for them, though it's not to build those things because that is what getting sold, that is what is liked by people.
Instead of looking from an approach from somebody of a developers trying to sell it, it's the consumers who will dictate the market and then the capacity building comes up.
And the encouragement and the awareness starts building at the community.
For example, we talk about heat every day now.
I think all of the panels know that most of the 100 cities, about 95 cities are actually looked up in India as bad situation.
We need to now and most of the people stay inside using air conditioning or electricity, which is again used for making it cool, but the patch of solutions are missing somewhere in the system in the layout.
If we follow awareness, entitlement, a little bit of incentives, and encouragement in the consumer side, I think then the banks will fall in line and then the market will take its own shape and the market demand supply.
Then check things and we'll be going very fast aggressively because it's not only go sector, it's the private sector which together build the cities, the countries, and the carbon footprint is the responsibility of all the cities parameters and the stakeholders.
Thank you.
Very quickly if you would like to add because we need to also move.
It's also true in Germany or in Berlin that the first buildings in that new type are more expensive than the conventional one.
But anyway, we started with that and of course, there are special funding schemes developed to support private investments and to balance that.
And then starting this kind of development and upscaling process.
Nowadays, you have a quite balanced situation between the timber frame construction and a conventional one.
And then you have some advantages, for instance, but if you're choosing this timber frame construction, Um, this is you have a very clean building site, and this is very fast, because it is prefabricated everything, and this is just put together on the construction site.
So within a couple of months you are finished and normally it takes two years to build with concrete and, you know, brick and so on.
And so this is also a financial advantage because the revenue starts earlier and so on, and the logistics is easier.
So this has to be compromised in a certain way.
And the projects I have shown, this is the approach.
This is a more midterm approach to upscale that.
And finally, you have thousands of these new flats, which are constructed of sustainable materials and not using concrete anymore.
I'm going somewhere else, very fast.
I live in a country where 87% of the population lives in cities.
Cities that grow are small and medium sized, big cities are not growing.
Funnially enough, there is a mismatch between the construction of new buildings and the growth in population.
You have cities where construction grows and population doesn't, and you have places where population grows and buildings don't.
Then you have a second phenomena that you have to add to that reality, which is a significant amount of the construction in Brazil itself construction, Cement consumption at the store door is significantly higher than by the construction industry.
So citizens are building their own houses.
And if you know the reality of Havells or slums in Brazil, you will know that our slums are made of concrete and steel.
They are not made of wood and recycled materials, okay? So this is another part of the trick.
So how exactly do you convince the slum dweller that needs to improve his house because we don't want them.
We don't believe anymore in trying to get people out of those places.
We want those communities to be resilient where they are.
How do you convince him to use low carbon sustainable materials techniques.
You need to trickle down the technology to the user.
We know for a fact that most of the people that build houses in slums in Brazil are the same people that work at formal construction sites.
So there is a connection of the workforce in one place of another.
That's the trick in a country like Brazil.
In Germany, the trick is different and we want to get there, but we aren't.
We need to move very fast.
So For the high income, living in a green building is very chicy Brazil.
You have a lot of nice green buildings now in high end neighborhoods, but that's not the issue.
If you really want to make an impact, you need to work on the other side of the trick.
That would be my comment thing.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for the very fruitful presentations.
Now we are running very fast.
We had quite a lot of time, but now we will go to the presentation by our UN colleagues.
That's the clicker, Mr.
Lunar.
Yes.
Thank you.
Mike, maybe you can say a few words about what you do and present your work.
Thank you very much.
I first would like to invite you to go with me a few levels up.
We had a discussion at the very local level.
We're not only going at the national but the international level and also to a different region.
I'm working at UNECE.
It's one of the five economic commissions of the United Nations.
It's the Economic Commission for Europe and you see on the map that we are covering what is more or less called the global North.
Our member states going all the way from Canada, USA, North America to Western, Eastern Europe, Caucuses Central Asia, slightly different area.
And also we organized in sectoral committees, we're covering a lot of different areas.
And for here for the discussion today, two committees are the ones that are important.
It's the committee on sustainable Energy and the committee on urban development, housing, and land management.
And some of the work I'm presenting here today is actually under a joint task force that we have on energy efficiency standards and buildings, but also under the energy committee, they work on a group of experts on energy efficiency.
And then on the urban side and the housing side, we have different activities related to improving housing, housing affordability.
So from the energy Sustainable Energy Committee, they're looking at energy as a system.
They have a systematic approach, and I think this is what you touched on already in a lot of points in the local presentation, saying that energy efficiency is more than just saving energy.
It helps to improve the affordability of housing.
It also improves the energy system resilience because it's also lowering the demand.
It's putting less pressure on the energy systems.
It helps us to mitigate emissions.
If we look into the circular construction systems, it's a contribution to resource efficiency, and also with data digital transformation, we can make this smarter and, um, building up the performance of buildings.
And so we're now looking at this coordinated approach that also, I think in Mumbai and Berlin was mentioned is that we need to scale this low carbon housing, but it requires rethinking of the system, how the different parts fit together.
And so it cannot be target in isolation.
But one part is the affordability, what do we how much does it cost in the end? Um, How can we is affordability and energy efficiency also reducing the cost of living for the residents? How can it be integrated in energy systems? Housing is not standalone, but it's also integrated in the heating systems and so on.
How can it be financed? What kind of tools do we need and what kind of instruments do we need to make to realize this? And, the supply chain, the materials, which we already touched on the timber issues and changing the materials and of course, the data.
This overview here is basically summing up of the joint task force on energy efficiency standards and building is looking at now.
We are the process of updating framework guidelines on energy efficiency standards in buildings.
They've been first developed in 2017, updated in 2020, and now we realized since then in the last six years, so much happened, we need to look at these guidelines again and look at these different components, energy as a system and also a more principle based approach on how to address energy efficiency in buildings.
So if anyone here is interested in contributing substantively to updating the guidelines or as a next step in reviewing what has been put together, you're very free to approach me.
We're at the stage we're launching this, so it's the right moment to still join this conversation.
And I just in the interest of time, I move now over to more of the work that we do under the committee on housing, and this is one of the flagship projects we've been preparing our country profiles on urban development, housing, and land management.
So we're bringing together land, housing and urban and these profiles are prepared at the request of a country and they basically we go with an independent team of experts to the country, we assess the situation.
There are a lot of consultations and experts exchanges.
Where we are then basically structuring what is the knowledge that is existing? How can it be integrated? How does it all fit together at national level, local level, regional level? And then the team of experts that comes comes in is providing this independent view.
So it also helps the government to take up the recommendations that are then being formulated because they're not biased.
They take a position.
The recommendations they're independent, neutral.
They're making recommendations into work and what could be continued, but also what doesn't work.
So it's tailored to the country and it gives the country and the government to do list and a list of recommendations of how to move forward.
Energy efficiency in housing is always part of the component.
It's an important aspect.
And so just to give you the most recent example is the country of Montenegro, very small country, 600,000 inhabitants.
But the energy efficiency is one of the key points there because in a lot of Eastern European countries, they have this prefabricated multifamily housing stock that are aging, that have not been retrofitted.
Where they are in they have high rates of ownership.
So after the collapse of the Soviet system, these apartment units have been transferred to the residents living in these apartments regardless if they have the financial means or not to maintain the apartments.
So there are very big differences in the quality of the housing stock.
And one thing we noticed that is missing in many western European countries is key is the organization of the owners.
So the private apartments are being maintained, but for the common spaces, there is no coordination.
No one is feeling responsible to maintaining them.
And so I will now go down to one very specific product that we have that I think applies is useful at the national level, but also at the local level for particularly in the context of the Eastern European region is this homeowner associations, so that you provide the legal framework, you have the finance mechanism and the municipal support and enforcement of, um, of these homeowner associations.
You make sure that if you have departments with a certain number of units, they create this ownership association.
They meet regularly.
They put funding aside, they contribute, so there's a financial means available for energy efficiency investments.
With this structure, they can also become eligible for loans or finance support program into larger energy efficiency investments.
And the additional component is the professional management that you invest in the training of these managers for the housing stock so they can coordinate and they have the financial understanding, the technical knowledge, and also conflict resolution skills of resolving the issues in this housing stock.
I'm just sharing the guidelines here that are very practical in a way that they not only define the terms that are relevant, but they have a long annex with templates coming from an overview of what should the law look like for this management of the housing stock? What could house rules look like? How do you organize an assembly, and what could be the terms of reference for such a professional manager of this building? I think I stop here very quick from our side.
Thank you very much and I hand back over to you.
Thank you so much, Mike.
Indeed, as a financial mechanism in Europe, it's really working very well, and this is really allows you to generate the resources to refurbishment of housing.
Of course, Europe is very different from Brazil or India because it's a lot of existing housing which needs to be refurbished and indeed homeownership associations, condominium guidelines are really critical.
To ensure that the financial mechanism exists.
This is an additional, in a way, sub regional perspective.
Now we're going zooming back to the global level.
Layer F habitats, we would like to hear a bit more about your global view and in a way before we will wrap up the discussion.
Thank you so much, Corona and good afternoon, everybody.
It's always amazing to speak last because it's making my job very easy being able to reflect on this fantastic panel.
I think I took down about ten questions that I'm that I was ready to ask, but I didn't get the chance because we had the fantastic questions coming from the audience, which is of course more important.
But one of the questions that you asked, I also had, so I'm very glad.
Maybe just to zoom out quickly for me and you habitat is, of course, how can we bring that housing and climate agenda together? I mean, of course, we're bringing it here together quite physically.
This is the exact same space that we had Cop 29 just 1.5 years ago.
But also, how can we make sure that this is really connected at a content level? Because I mean, I think we all know housing is not just a building.
It's really it's our homes.
It's where people live.
It's where our kids grow up and of course, getting that right means also trickling down and getting a lot of other things right.
Just as one example, I was two weeks ago speaking to somebody from Dominica who said, Well, a couple of years ago had a massive hurricane.
30% of our homes got destroyed, 60% got severely damaged.
What does that do to societies, to people, to social fabrics, to kids being able to go to school, the ability to put food on the table.
I think that question of if we get housing right, it of course has a big impact on how we live.
Maybe to reflect on some of the things that I've been hearing is, of course, now the million dollar question of how do you get There's a housing need.
It should be sustainable and low carbon so we don't lock ourselves in, but it should still be affordable.
I think that affordability question I would have loved to talk a little bit more about, have some questions because I've also been talking to some cities and they said, well, this is my budget.
Do I built a lot and quick or do I but sustainable and long term? Does that need to be a trade off and I think we've heard it shouldn't be.
But I would love to hear if that's the reality in every city worldwide.
Needs to be adequate and also in terms of access to basic services.
We've been hearing some examples of buildings being really integrated into the fabric, having access to a good transport network.
But this is really something that needs to be put up front and center because if the building is in the middle of nowhere and there's no transport network, also, what does that mean for our emissions? I think the last thing, it also needs to be climate resilient.
If I go back to my example from Dominica, what do we do in case of these now more frequent eclimic disasters, sea level rise, floods, and so on.
Really getting all of this right is, I think a very tricky part.
Then we talked about the informal sector and the informality.
Just to throw in another number, in Kenya, 9% of the buildings are being built by architects.
So the rest is being self built and how do you get, you know, strike that balance? So, that's my brief reflections, more questions than answers.
But I do want to offer say one entry point that's not perfect, but that I think has an opportunity to at least get some of these questions and conversations fast tracked and to For me, this is the NDCs, the national climate plans that are currently in the process of being updated by countries.
There's around 140 that now have updated countries that have updated their national climate plans, and um Looking into these climate plans, my hope was my dream was that all of them reflect cities.
I got really close to having my dream achieved.
80% of these NDCs, the national climate plans that have been submitted so far are really thinking about cities.
What I find fantastic is that they're not just looking at this, sprinkling it in a half sentence somewhere tucked in the annex.
No, it's really thinking about, these are the different sectors that we need to talk about to address our Paris goals.
This is how we want to work with cities to make to achieve this.
It's specifically in the transport sector.
It's about built environment, it's about water.
Infrastructure.
That's something that gives me quite a bit of hope.
Again, they're not perfect, but I think they open a window of opportunity.
They also about half of them are really talking about the built environment and the infrastructure that's needed in cities, specifically talking about, these are the flood risks, how do we climate proof the built environment? How do we make sure that there's a resilience of the critical services that our cities need? How do we make sure that cities are connected, that urban planning aspect that I think many of the colleagues have um really talked about here as well.
So that's something that gives me hope because there is a conversation happening in these NDCs around the topics that I just talked about.
There is a focus on, we need to make sure that housing is adequate and safe.
There is a conversation around how do we make sure that housing is climate resilient, but also that it is affordable.
That is giving me really, really, really some hope there as well.
Of course, now this is about turning this into implementation into action and NDC, in the end is a piece of paper, but, I think this is an opportunity to have more finance going into addressing these issues.
Why? Because also many banks are under pressure to make sure that they are Paris aligned, that the financing into infrastructure is Paris aligned.
Of course, if an NDC says, look, this is how we want to work in our cities in these sectors, that helps to make that link happen.
Again, just an opportunity to really make sure that we get money and finance and capacities into the places that really need it the most.
One last reflection because Guana asked me to do that in the very beginning about CAMP countries.
We looked into how CAMP countries are, including cities.
On the surface, very similar to the rest of them, but if you dig a little bit deeper, there is much more structured conversation in the NDCs around the importance of alignment of policies between the national and the local level, but also much more conversation about the capacities that might be needed at the local level to make all of this happen.
Again, I think an important vehicle to turn some of these needs into action.
Of course, we've been working closely with UNP on the sub national action group.
I think this is a fantastic opportunity to get some of the local perspective into the global ABC, but of course, also here to work with all countries that either as the finalizing the NDC still around 50 left, but also want to talk about what do we now need to do in order to turn this into implementation.
Back to you, Kara.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Leah, for this conclusion, but also connecting this discussion in this one of the many events into the overall discussion here at the Woof 13.
We, of course, today are continuing this discussion.
So today at 4:00 P.M.
At the multipurpose room five, we'll be launching a report on the engagement of sub national governments implementation, not only Paris Agreement, which is subject for Trump, but also in other real conventions such as conventional biodiversities and conventions on pollution, so it will be at 4:00 P.M.
Today.
But for now to thank all the speakers and maybe then ask not to leave them, but just to make a picture of all the speakers maybe here in front and ask volunteers to help us to do that.