Opinion piece by Sue Riddlestone OBE
CEO & co-founder, Bioregional, NED, Future Homes Hub

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were announced in New York with some fanfare involving Angelina Jolie and a host of children in September 2015. They were co-created by all nations in a multi-year process involving wider civil society including myself and our team at Bioregional. The SDGs are truly the closest thing we have to a plan for the better world we all want to see. Take a look! https://sdgs.un.org/goals 

The SDGs are a voluntary responsibility for Governments to take action on, and report on. But everything we do as a sector contributes to their achievement.  

As the new Vice President of the Chartered Institute of Building, Professor Saul Humphrey points out in part one of our long read today: the construction sector can directly affect nine of the 17 goals, and with a little more alignment, we can actually do so much more. In part two of our long read, by Cressida Curtis, Group Sustainability Director of Wates Group, Cressida reflects on what has been achieved by the sector since the goals were launched.  

In my opinion piece today, I’m going to focus on Goal 12, Sustainable Consumption and Production and construction materials. This is a huge impact of the sector and one which we are only just waking up to.  

Ensuring that products are produced and used sustainably, and creating a truly circular economy, lies at the heart of our one planet living approach. Bioregional was actively involved in the negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals from 2010 to 2017 and had a formal role as UN NGO global focal point for Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP), to make sure this critical issue was understood and properly recognised in the SDGs. This included writing and presenting a report to the UN on why SCP is vital.  And we succeeded: Goal 12 is devoted to SCP, and 1 in 5 of the SDG targets relate to it. You can read more about our role here.   

Today we work with the UN to help implement Goal 12 as part of the UN One Planet Network, a network that anyone can join, full of resources, the latest data and expertise. In 2023, we worked with UN Environment Programme to source and create a Sustainable Building Materials Hub hosted on the Global Alliance of Buildings and Construction website.  As part of this work, research by Yale University showed that 9% of global carbon emissions are coming from construction materials. I will say that again. Nine per cent of total global carbon emissions are coming from construction materials! And that as we continue to work on operational emissions, the embodied impact of construction materials will form half of emissions by the sector. 

So how can we reduce this impact? The study went on to model options and found that only by increasing design for deconstruction and re-use, a more circular approach and use of bio-based materials could we make a big enough dent in it. It ruffled a few feathers in the cement and steel industries at the time. But this is the reality we have to face.

It’s no wonder that as we currently work through a net-zero carbon plan and glidepath for the homebuilding sector at the Future Homes Hub – where I serve as a non-executive director – we found that we couldn’t achieve it by just swapping to low carbon steel and cement. We need to start building differently for re-use, circularity, and include more bio-based materials as the Yale report highlighted. This is a focus of Bioregional’s seminar on day two at the materials hub of Futurebuild, where we will hear how developers and architects are pioneering these approaches.

And it’s not just carbon emissions, it’s the impact of resource extraction on nature, people and our environment. For example, sand seems like a pretty innocuous raw material, doesn’t it? But actually, sand extraction is having a terrible impact – the marine dredging industry is digging up 6 billion tons per year, which is significantly impacting biodiversity and coastal communities. Do you know where your sand comes from? If you want a deep dive on this, on 18 February, the UNEP network is co-hosting a whole day global roundtable about sand!

The Alliance for Sustainable Building Products is another great network, chockfull of resources and expertise. Visit their stand at Futurebuild this year.

We brought the SDGs to Futurebuild in 2018 when we welcomed Paula Caballero Gomez one of the three South American women diplomats who proposed the SDGs and whom we worked with to secure the goals. And again in 2019, we had an SDGs stand with many attendees signing up to taking action on the SDGs.

We are bringing the SDGs back to Futurebuild this year as the Chartered Institute of Building gets behind them. Join me, Saul and Cressida for our seminar on day two, where we’ll discuss what progress has been made, and what we as an industry can do.