The UK's largest architecture firm, Foster + Partners, has criticised a RIBA sustainability report backed by nearly 250 built environment organisations, claiming that it contradicts the watershed Paris Agreement treaty on climate change.
Foster + Partners is one of only two architecture studios among the country's top 10 largest that have failed to endorse the report ? the other being Zaha Hadid Architects.
The studio told Dezeen that by calling for calculations about buildings' carbon impact to be based on whole life-cycle consumption, rather than only operational emissions data, the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) report diverges from the Paris Agreement.
RIBA presented its climate report at COP26
Signed by nearly 200 countries in 2015 and the basis for global climate negotiations at COP26, the Paris Agreement set a landmark ambition to "pursue efforts" to keep global temperature rises within 1.5 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels, with an emphasis on governments setting targets to limit their own greenhouse gas emissions. A consumption-based approach, as advocated by the RIBA report, would instead see nations' carbon footprints measured based on the total emissions associated with the goods and services they use, not just those they directly emit.
For example, that would mean the UK would have to include the carbon impact of producing concrete manufactured by other countries but used in UK buildings ? known as embodied carbon ? when assessing...