“Do you like a chocolate bar?” he asked, a question to which Kenderes, Vice President, CP&I Major Projects, at McKinsey & Company, nodded. “Do you look at what’s inside the chocolate bar, and when you look inside, are you conscious about the calorie intake?”

The light-hearted moment took place during the question-and-answer session of the Closing Keynote of the 2022 ULI Singapore Annual Conference, a session titled “Building Back Better, a Net Zero World”.

An award-winning architect, academic, author and TV presenter, regarded as one of the world’s thought leaders in sustainable design, and the Founding Principal of Pomeroy Studio, Pomeroy used the candy bar analogy to illustrate his point on using embodied emissions, or embodied carbon footprint, as a measurement necessary for achieving the vision of a net  zero or even a carbon-negative world.

“If we are conscious of what we’re eating [and its calorie count] … ideally, we should also be thinking about the kilograms of carbon dioxide per square metre, or the embodied count of every single product that we are bringing into the built environment,” he said.

Ultimately, Pomeroy said, a top-down government approach would not help the world achieve net zero emissions by 2050, a target experts have agreed would need to be attained in order to combat the worst impacts of climate change for this and future generations.

Instead, he identified four spheres of influence, namely civil society, state, corporation and academia, that will need to come together and collaborate in aspects such as investment, research, commerce and innovation in order to ensure that all their collective efforts synergise in the same, positive direction.

He also highlighted the need for a “socio-cultural” sustainability that goes beyond just environmental sustainability, and looking for lateral sources of inspiration, so that we can learn lessons from another time or another sector to inform ways to reduce our carbon footprint.

When it comes to society, “among the Gen Y and the Gen Z, there is this remarkable embrace of the green agenda; they naturally want to do the right thing, and the news [about climate change] and movies being made about it is enough to scare anyone,” said Pomeroy.

During their discussion, Kenderes asked Pomeroy if stakeholders in the built-environment industry, particularly that of Southeast Asia, really understood their responsibility and what it means to be doing their part in achieving the net zero goal.

He pointed to some compelling statistics that Pomeroy had mentioned earlier, that 40 percent of carbon emissions around the world come from the built environment, of which 80 percent come from the cities that collectively take up just one percent of the global surface area.

By 2050, in less than 30 years, or about a generation, 75 percent of the world’s population would be living in city centres.

Pomeroy said that the players in the built-environment industry could fall within two camps, using Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb”, as an example of someone who pursued technical excellence while setting aside the potential pitfalls of his invention.

“Some of us have those Oppenheimer moments, those Pandora’s Box moments, where we go and do something but don’t necessarily think about the consequences of our actions. Or we wax lyrical about zero-carbon development but never really get in the game, never really complete [anything].”

He also noted that in the past 10 to 15 years, some members of the industry had been “scrambling in the dark” as to how to be able to reduce carbon emissions. They would aim to achieve green ratings and certifications by simply adding some newfangled technologies to what was actually a “business-as-usual” real-estate product.

To Pomeroy, the most important thing now was for all stakeholders in the industry to establish the right mindset, to “get into the game and take a swing of the bat” in pursuit of a cleaner, greener future.

“I’m not saying we get it right all the time. We just have to do the right thing, we have to try, and I think that what we want is to use our R&D expertise and our collaborations with academia, and start to push that commercial agenda. If we can lead by example, actually getting carbon-negative buildings and districts built, then we are in a happier place and can sleep well at night.”