Marty Verry: Farm emissions should not be targeted while concrete gets a pass

Most cement is manufactured offshore and as such is not touched by the ETS. Photo /123rf

THREE KEY FACTS

• The Government plans to regulate farm-level emissions.
• Plans to limit concrete’s carbon intensity has been abandoned.
• The “Building for Climate Change” programme would have required measuring and limiting new buildings' carbon footprints.

Last month’s Economist magazine had two different articles quoting exactly the same figures; “7-8% of global emissions”. One related to the emissions of the world’s concrete sector, the other, the emissions of the world’s livestock sector.

This got me thinking; why has our Government announced plans to introduce farm-level emissions regulation, while abandoning plans to restrict the carbon intensity of building materials — of which concrete is the worst offender?

New Zealand’s international climate commitments will require emissions reductions by all sectors. So why should farmers subsidise foreign cement? Politically, one would have thought the farmer lobby would have more pull with this particular Government than the concrete lobby.

Last year’s green initiative bonfire saw the abandonment of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) planned Building for Climate Change programme. It would have brought in the requirement to measure, then limit, the carbon footprint of all new buildings. That would have forced material producers to decarbonise or face substitution. The initiative mirrors similar programmes globally and has strong local support.

Off the hook — at farmers' expense

Most cement is manufactured offshore and as such is not touched by the ETS. This programme would have been the market signal that the concrete industry needed to decarbonise. Now they are off the hook. Why would they research and invest to decarbonise if there is no potential loss of market share or margin to justify the business case? This is elementary business logic.

Stranger still is why farmers will face regulation, yet have few options to avoid emissions, while there are plenty of existing options to reduce concrete’s emissions should the Government so incentivise.

Principle among the substitution options is “mass engineered timber”, according to Michael Barnard, a climate futurist, strategist and author who published Cement Displacement and Decarbonisation through 2100, projecting the decade-by-decade change to the building and construction market over the next 75 years. Barnard is chief strategist for TFIE (The Future is Electric), consulting to billion-dollar hedge funds and multinationals.

In discussing alternatives, Barnard says: “In my assessment, the largest of these is likely to be engineered timber,” adding that “structural strength is equal to reinforced concrete with a fifth the mass. Every tonne of engineered timber displaces 4.8 tonnes of reinforced concrete.”

Substitution with sustainable engineered timber would be no bad thing. It’s made locally, drawing from supply chains that reach deep into provinces such as Northland, Bay of Plenty, East Coast and Nelson. There are plenty of employment, economic development, tax-take and balance-of-payments reasons too.

A stronger domestic market would also provide the platform for scale investment in wood processing that could in turn help double the sector’s export earnings and lower construction costs locally. Modelling indicates more than a billion dollars of likely investment in wood processing could follow.

Smart targeted green-building regulation required

So where does this leave our climate policy when it comes to the vast emissions from building materials? In our view the baby needs to be rescued from the Building for Climate Change bathwater — but with modification.

One of the Government’s hesitancies has been forcing designers to measure and report on embodied carbon. However, technology has caught up here. Plug-in design services such as V-Quest allow designers to measure a building’s carbon emissions, cost and mass during design. It instantly populates the reporting MBIE wants, while the cost is insignificant.

The other reluctance is the burden of another building industry regulation. There is a simple tweak: the regulation should only apply to buildings that are likely to have significant carbon savings.

For instance, there is no use in regulating small buildings made structurally from low/negative carbon materials. As wood has over 90% market share in residential housing, this tweak would eliminate the need for over 30,000 dwellings to report carbon.

The low-hanging fruit that are ripe for targeted carbon regulation are:

• any large buildings over 1000sq m
• any small buildings not made from low/negative carbon structural materials.

Emissions-saving potential

By requiring designers to calculate a building’s embodied carbon, they will be more likely to make low-emission choices. By way of example, the graphic below shows the carbon analysis using a Naylor Love model of a building with a total of 7700sq m of flooring that could be made from either concrete or cross-laminated timber (CLT).

It shows local supply of Red Stag CLT has one-tenth the emissions of concrete flooring. The reduction is 1346 tonnes if biogenic carbon stored in wood is included.

The V-Quest tool will do all this automatically, but only if regulation requires it.

This Government has shown a willingness to introduce targeted regulation to engineer pragmatic climate outcomes. It did so in restricting the type of forested farmland that can enter the ETS. It could do so again here, so farmers don’t need to carry concrete.

Marty Verry is Group CEO of Red Stag Timber & Red Stag TimberLab.

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