How far are you willing to Go Green?
A) Not at all
B) Within my budget and convenience
C) I can stretch myself a little
D) Whatever it takes
Now as a sustainability consultant, I come across all four categories of building developers and owners - the ones who don't want to take the trouble and benefit of Green, the ones who want all the benefit but aren't willing to go the extra mile, the ones who will just go the extra mile and the ones who will run as far as they can. You can probably guess that D is the least popular choice whilst B is the most dangerous.
For the non-willing population of A, the govt. offers several incentives to encourage sustainable design and development based on the Green Building rating a particular building achieves. Seems brilliant, right. Because monetary incentives are supposed to motivate us to do good at a reasonable cost- say offering extra FAR offsets the cost of investment in Green since the builder gets a payback with more space for renting. WIN-WIN !
Not really. What this approach overlooks is that building regulations are decided to optimise population density, so that natural resources of a projects are not stretched beyond their capacity. Permitting the owner to build more leads to congestion, and over burden on natural resources. And guess what - the worst part is that before such incentives came into place only category C&D developers - only those who actually understood the importance of sustainability went for it Now to take the extra benefits, category B and god help us category A builders are also wanting to go "green" - without lifting an extra finger, they want to reap the benefits. So not only is the building not sustainable at all, it cramps in more and more people leading to a horrendous system of wastage and exploitation of resources. I had a professor who used to say that the best schooling is when there is no attendence - only the ones who are interested would show up, not trouble makers just attending for attendence. Same goes here.
Something to think about - how to make green building incentives lucrative enough but at the same time ensuring that the incentive isn't a slow death of the entire system.
A) Not at all
B) Within my budget and convenience
C) I can stretch myself a little
D) Whatever it takes
Now as a sustainability consultant, I come across all four categories of building developers and owners - the ones who don't want to take the trouble and benefit of Green, the ones who want all the benefit but aren't willing to go the extra mile, the ones who will just go the extra mile and the ones who will run as far as they can. You can probably guess that D is the least popular choice whilst B is the most dangerous.
For the non-willing population of A, the govt. offers several incentives to encourage sustainable design and development based on the Green Building rating a particular building achieves. Seems brilliant, right. Because monetary incentives are supposed to motivate us to do good at a reasonable cost- say offering extra FAR offsets the cost of investment in Green since the builder gets a payback with more space for renting. WIN-WIN !
Not really. What this approach overlooks is that building regulations are decided to optimise population density, so that natural resources of a projects are not stretched beyond their capacity. Permitting the owner to build more leads to congestion, and over burden on natural resources. And guess what - the worst part is that before such incentives came into place only category C&D developers - only those who actually understood the importance of sustainability went for it Now to take the extra benefits, category B and god help us category A builders are also wanting to go "green" - without lifting an extra finger, they want to reap the benefits. So not only is the building not sustainable at all, it cramps in more and more people leading to a horrendous system of wastage and exploitation of resources. I had a professor who used to say that the best schooling is when there is no attendence - only the ones who are interested would show up, not trouble makers just attending for attendence. Same goes here.
Something to think about - how to make green building incentives lucrative enough but at the same time ensuring that the incentive isn't a slow death of the entire system.
