CLIMATE CHANGE Weeks of torrential rain across northern Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands caused deadly flooding
Sustain and deliver The real estate sector will be in high profile at COP26 in November, as the world’s attention pivots from the pandemic to the urgent need to create sustainable buildings and communities. Ben Cooper asks what more the built environment — the single largest contributor to greenhouse-gas emissions — can do to help save the planet
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URVEYING the traumatic damage to the town of Schuld in northern Germany after violent flood waters engulfed the region and claimed nearly 200 lives, German chancellor Angela Merkel described the “unreal and horrific situation” before her. There were, she said, “nearly no words in the German language” to describe the devastation — devastation that was repeated in Belgium and the Netherlands after weeks of torrential rain finally took its deadly toll. Armin Laschet, state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, said the flooding was a “catastrophe of historic dimensions”.
MIPIM ONE BOOK
The grim reality — and people’s worst fear now — is that Laschet might have been more accurate to say that this was a catastrophe of futuristic dimensions. Should the “bleak” future forewarned in the 2019 UN report into climate change become reality, extreme weather disasters like these could become alarmingly frequent. If the real estate industry was ever in denial about its role in contributing to the problem — or its potential to be part of the solution — there is one key statistic that the whole profession should keep in mind: of all carbon emissions from human activity globally, an astonishing 29
SEPTEMBER 2021
