China's buildings need to go 'green' - before it's too late

China is currently juggling drought, crippling power outages and the world's highest carbon emissions. The country's government is painfully aware that buildings account for a quarter of China's energy use and has pushed hard for developers to spend time thinking about water, energy and carbon savings.

Li Keqiang (China's next premier)  was in the UK to pay a visit to the Building Research Establishment (BRE) – a group of architects, engineers, and scientists at the cutting edge of new building techniques.

Founded in 1921, Building Research Establishment started off by studying the behavior of reinforced concrete and later came up with a British standard for bricks. Today, it experiments with how to make houses out of hemp and wool, how to insulate them properly, and how to take our old buildings and make them energy efficient.

As the man about to become second-in-command of a nation that plans to build the equivalent of a new Chicago every year until 2030, Mr Li didn't have to feign interest as he inspected a zero-carbon home, a house built from recycled steel, and a converted and modernized Victorian stable block.

In the next 20 years, China plans to urbanize as many as 300 million of its rural people, driving an insatiable demand for energy and materials as almost the equivalent of America's population fires up their new fridges and air-conditioners.

Fast-forward six months and BRE was signed up by the Chinese to create a $158 million, 4.8 million sq ft innovation park along similar lines in Beijing, together with Vanke, China's largest property developer.

The Chinese park will hopefully take BRE's research and adapt it for the skyscrapers and climate of the Chinese market, where energy savings incorporated into today's buildings can slash billions of watts off tomorrow's (mostly coal-fired) energy-generating demands.

"Britain is arguably leading the world in is architectural design, engineering, costing and integrated expertise," said Peter Bonfield, BRE chief executive. "We hope to bring demonstrations [to China] of how this can work. I think that will lead the charge so there will be more procurement from Chinese companies and the Chinese government."

China is currently juggling drought, crippling power outages and the world's highest carbon emissions. The country's government is painfully aware that buildings account for a quarter of China's energy use and has pushed hard for developers to spend time thinking about water, energy and carbon savings.

The "green building" industry could eventually be worth 1.5 trillion yuan ($227 Billion) according to Qiu Baoxing, the vice minister of the Housing and Urban-Rural Development ministry.

The new five-year plan explicitly names green building as one way of meeting the binding target of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 16% and 17% respectively by 2015. And while there are no prescriptive measures on how builders should act, architects said the plan had provided a framework to work around.

"It represents a direction that can be translated into action here on the ground," said Mark Harrison, the Beijing urban planning director of the Epsom-based architectural design firm Atkins.

Already, Chinese buildings are being retro-fitted with better windows and heating systems, and the number of buildings certified with badges of sustainability, such as LEED and BREEAM, are rising rapidly.

The first LEED certification was awarded in China in 2005. By 2009 more than 100 projects had applied for some kind of green rating. Now that number is approaching 400, which largely consists of government buildings, museums and high-end hotels.

But considering there are 21 billion square feet of new buildings going up every year, equivalent to 150,000 eight-story buildings, there is a long way to go.  One major challenge is China's huge range of climates, which make it difficult to roll out a national standard building regulation.  Another is the focus among developers on quick profits over long-term sustainability.

"Most architects don't know how to calculate energy use, they just build buildings like boxes," said Zhu Yingxin, vice-dean of Tsinghua University's Department of Building Science. "We can use computer simulations to calculate energy beforehand, but it's time-consuming work and many developers only want to pay for what they can see."

"There's a lot of opportunity for dilution and reinterpretation between the top level and what happens locally," said Chris Twinn, Shanghai director of sustainability at the London-based design and engineering consultation Arup. "There's a certain desire on the part of developers to give a good [green] impression when they're trying to seek land use changes, but in reality they may not be taking it all the way through."

Developers still commonly believe sustainable construction means simply tacking on green components, which alone can cost 10% to 40% more than traditional building materials.  But when integrated intelligently from the start, utilities savings quickly cancel out the extra costs. Total upfront costs sometimes even dip below the price of traditional buildings.

China's first LEED-certified green building in Beijing uses 74% less energy and 64% less water than average office buildings in the neighborhood. And, most importantly, its upfront building costs were also 5% lower.

"There are a lot of trade-offs involved," said Barbara Finamore, China program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "You pay more for the windows, for example, and your insulation is better. Therefore you don't need to spend as much on the heating and ventilation system."

Alan Kell, managing director of the UK-China Eco-cities & Green Building Group, which promotes building cooperation between the two countries, said this is where UK companies are well-positioned to help China.

"It's not easy to deliver green anywhere in the world," he said. "But in China because of the limitations on skills, products and standard practice, the whole integration of systems into buildings is still an area with a lot to be done where British engineering and design is very much leading the way."

Mr Kell's group has partnered with UK Trade & Investment and the Chinese government to bring in more than 140 British investors, law firms and construction companies to initiate pilot eco-cities across China.  The plan is to gradually incorporate sustainable habits in cities of 500,000 to 1 million people through green building projects combined with clean transportation and energy production.

It's one of the first stages in a larger goal the Chinese government has to build 300 eco-cities across China over the next 25 years - an undertaking China has invited the UK to be a strategic partner in.  Project organizers estimate, based on UN Environmental Council reports, that if the full 300 city scale is reached, it would save 600 million to 2.4 billion tons of carbon emissions – 1.8% to 7.2% of the world's 2010 total.

Steve O'Leary, director of infrastructure and low carbon at UK Trade & Investment, said sustainable buildings' prospects are promising for foreign enterprises.  "The city expansion, the rate of movement from the rural to the urban economy is gigantic; the number of developments is gigantic," he said. "Nobody has the market sewn up. In the domestic market, Vanke turns out ludicrous numbers of houses and it has only 4% of the market."

The London-based architectural firm Benoy entered the Chinese market in 2001 and derives more than 40% of its global revenue there.  Stricter regulations on residential real estate investment stemming from fears of a housing bubble have led many investors to the commercial and mixed-use facilities Benoy specializes in.

Trevor Vivian, a director at Benoy, said that in spite of a lot of lip service to sustainable building over the years, increased awareness and commitments are starting to take hold among developers, government officials and even tenants. "They understand it more," he said. They know what it's going to cost and what the advantages are."

This understanding, he said, is a matter of survival. "Let's face it, in sustainability terms, unless we can help China change direction the whole planet is screwed."