The urgent need for decarbonisation
Main stage 2021 - Keynote summary
A bleak state
What can we do?
We are building our way to climate chaos
Reforesting the planet retimbering the city
We will have to replace one tera ton of anthropogenic mass with 1 Tera ton of Biomass by turning the built environment into a carbon sink and build from timber. In 2050 there will be about 2 billion more people on this earth. All of them will obviously need housing. A scenario analysis shows that if 90% of those new buildings are built with concrete this will add another 70 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. If you would build 90% of those from timber though it would only amount to a fraction of this.
Conclusion
We will have to rethink the way we build. Now! For this we need to create a sustainable forestry to provide all the timber for construction. On the northern hemisphere there is enough timber to build plenty of houses. In the southern hemisphere things look very bleak though because we keep destroying the forests instead of reforest. We CAN undo deforestation it is not a matter of nature it is a matter of politics. Recycling or refurbishing building materials and building from organic materials and running the buildings with renewable energy is what needs to happen to go carbon negative.
