UN report outlines how developing, developed countries can reduce emissions from constructions (GS Paper 3, Environment)
Why in news?
- Recently, a report titled, ‘Building Materials and The Climate: Constructing a New Future’ was released by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture.
Key Highlights:
- Developing countries should switch from unsustainable building practices to using alternative low-carbon building materials to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
- About 37 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to the built environment sector, which includes buildings, the distribution systems that supply water and electricity, and the roads, bridges, and transportation systems.
- The UNEP report makes a case for “Avoid-Shift-Improve” strategies to reduce emissions.
- “Avoiding” emissions through circularity to ensure waste is eliminated while extending a building’s life, “Shifting” to sustainable materials, and
- “Improving” the production of conventional materials such as concrete, steel, aluminium, plastics, glass and bricks.
Types of emissions:
- Greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment are categorised into two groups: embodied emissions and operational emissions.
- Embodied emissions are all the emissions associated with the construction and demolishing of a building. They also include emissions from extraction, manufacturing, transport and on-site construction of building materials and “end-of-life” demolition or reuse.
- Operational emissions are the emissions generated while maintaining the building’s indoor “comfort levels,” including by heating, cooling, lighting and electrical appliances.
- Indirect operational emissions from residential buildings make up a majority of emissions (11 per cent), while embodied emissions from the use of concrete, steel and aluminium account for at least six per cent.
Solutions:
- The UNEP, warns that embodied carbon (the amount of carbon dioxide across the life cycle of the built environment process) is projected to surge from 25 per cent to nearly half (49 per cent) by 2050, whereas the share of operational carbon emissions will shrink due to increased adoption of renewable energy and improvement of energy-efficient buildings.
- Developed countries should focus on renovating existing and ageing building stock. Renovating a building generates 50-75 per cent fewer emissions than new construction.
- For new buildings, the experts call for incorporating circular design strategies such as the design for disassembly. It is a design process that enables the recovery of products, parts and materials when a building is disassembled or renovated. This can reduce greenhouse emissions by 10-50 per cent.
New supply-and-demand model:
- A new supply-and-demand model should be developed. Tasks such as carefully dismantling buildings for storing, preparation and maintenance of second-cycle materials for resale will enable circular economies while providing job opportunities.
- If G7 countries and China use recycled materials, they could reduce emissions in the material cycle of residential buildings by 80 to 100 per cent by 2050. In India, the reductions could reach 50-70 per cent, the report quotes the International Resource Panel (a scientific panel of experts that aims to help nations use natural resources sustainably).
- They also state that increasing the lifetime of buildings creates significant opportunities to reduce aggregate embodied carbon.
Bio-based materials:
- The second principle is to switch towards properly managed bio-based materials.
- Of the available options, mass timber has emerged as an attractive alternative to carbon-intensive concrete and steel due to its potential for scalability, sustainability, strength and flexibility in mid-rise urban buildings.
- Bamboo can be processed and manufactured into a variety of composite materials called engineered bamboo. This version has demonstrated structural performance similar to that of cross-laminated timber and steel.
Improve:
- As for the third principle “improve”, UNEP recommended electrifying and decarbonising the energy that is supplied to the production and maintenance of materials, buildings and urban infrastructure across their life cycle.
- Processing of cement, the binding agent in concrete, contributes 7 per cent of global carbon emissions. Solutions such as reducing the clinker (produced from limestone and chalk)-to-cement ratio and increasing the share of cement alternatives, among others, could help in decarbonising the sector.
- Another technology that could potentially be used is Carbon capture and utilisation for concrete production (CCU concrete). It is a process of removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it within the building material itself over time
- It is estimated that CCU concrete can remove 0.1 to 1.4 gigatonnes of CO2 by 2050.
- Avoiding raw material extraction by promoting steel reuse and producing steel from scrap (discarded steel or steel product) can save around 60-80 per cent of energy.
- It also helps to reduce steel demand by extending building lifetimes, and switching to circular bio-based materials such as engineered timber and bamboo, it added.
- Using renewable energy for aluminium production is important and producing aluminium from scrap can reduce the energy demand by 70-90 per cent.
How fraternity in India is different from the idea enshrined in the Constitution
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Constitution)
Context:
- While fraternity remains one of the chief goals of India’s parliamentary democracy, and is actually the foundational political objective of its constitutional democracy, the current nature of India’s fraternity is different from the political fraternity espoused in its Constitution.
Idea of fraternity:
- The idea of fraternity, as philosopher Angel Puyol argues in his 2019 book Political Fraternity- Democracy beyond Freedom & Democracy, should be mainly understood in the domain of the political.
- The concept involves the emancipation and empowerment of the people despite its variegated history, since the time of Plato; and though neglected, it remains a significant tenet of liberal political philosophy along with the idea of liberty and equality.
- India’s independence struggle, and the subsequent emergence of constitutional democracy saw the necessity of liberty, equality and fraternity for a complex Indian society at the precipice of becoming an independent republic.
- In this context, Ambedkar’s stress on the inseparability of the three ideas and the underlining of fraternity cannot be emphasised enough.
- The framers of the Indian Constitution knew the significance of fraternity in a society, divided on the basis of various hierarchical social inequalities.
Origins of the concept:
Ancient times:
- In Plato’s Lysis, the philosopher invokes the word philia (love) for the strong desire to pursue wisdom. That is, love and friendship with others becomes more meaningful through the sharing of knowledge. The emphasis is on ‘share’ which gives an early idea on the discourse of fraternity in ancient Greece.
- In Aristotle, there is emergence of the polis — the logical location of a man who remains, first and foremost, a political being, and hence is part of the polis and not of the wild. Justice and friendship among citizens came to be the most enduring features of the polis. This here, is the birth of the idea of political fraternity.
Middle ages:
- In the middle ages, fraternity flourished mostly through religion, within the churning of Christian society in Europe.
- The concept of fraternity then eventually found its entry into politics with the French revolution of 1789 in the triptych of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’.
Friendship among equals:
- In community ties, one sees an integral value system which is the foundation of the idea of fraternity. The privileging of the idea of community and the moral values associated with it, over the individual, gradually gave way to religious morality and its associated ‘way of life’.
- For, in order to have fraternal bonding between individuals, they must have a shared past.
- The shared history of India is marred by the caste system, and it militates against the principle of equality as well as the idea of liberty.
- The traditional roots of organising civic life in India is predominantly communal; but the Constitution privileges the individual leading to everyday conflict with community.
Feasibility in India:
- Therefore, the only conception of fraternity feasible for India must be rooted in politics, the only realm where caste privilege can be challenged.
- The idea needs to be curated and carved, and instilled through political conditioning and not from the stand point of any moral considerations.
- One of the main ideas behind the introduction of a slew of affirmative actions, of which the reservation system has survived was to build a certain equality between extremely different social groups in terms of their access to social and economic goods.
The limits to fraternity:
- Certain preconditions are necessary in order to achieve the kind of political fraternity inculcated by the Constitution of India.
- At the very first, fraternity does not mean anything if it glosses over social inequalities and then invokes social solidarity. Such a solidarity comes riding on the hate against an imaginary other, and tends to maintain social status quo which bolsters the already privileged at the cost of the continued subjugation of the underprivileged.
- The call of such a fraternity is increasingly replaced with the rhetoric of belligerent nationalism which castigates a home grown religious minority as its arch enemy. Religious minorities have faced such social and political opprobrium countless times in this country.
Conclusion:
- To conclude, in India, caste and the idea of political fraternity, given its social milieu, cannot coexist.
- One has to give way for the other to emerge. And to figure out which one survives and which goes, is the task of the politics of the future.
