Kicking the Habit

Is anyone else alarmed by how close we are to the year 2030, or is it just me? Eleven years ago, Perkins Eastman committed to the 2030 Challenge, which called for all new buildings and major renovations to be designed to be carbon neutral by or before the year 2030. To reach its goal, the challenge proposed simple steps that ratcheted up percentage reductions from the baselines every few years. Good in theory, the process has been challenging in practice, as we (and the rest of the AEC industry) have started to plateau around the 50 percent reduction line, and we can’t seem to shake it.

So, how are we going to meet our commitment with fewer than five years to go, especially when we are swimming upstream with the federal government’s aggressive rollback of its climate commitments?

Reflecting on Progress Made

In the early aughts, Architecture 2030 was established as a nonprofit research organization in response to the climate emergency. Knowing the projected growth in global building stock required in the coming decades, and the role the built environment plays in carbon emissions (42 percent of annual global CO₂ emissions, or more), Architecture 2030 challenged the AEC industry to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate exceedance of the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold in 2006. A few years later, the 2030 Challenge was adopted by the AIA, which created the 2030 Commitment, inviting architecture firms to sign on and transparently report their progress on an annual basis.

AIA 2030 Commitment Submission Highlights for 2023

Perkins Eastman Submitted

projects in 2023

of these projects are targeting Net Zero Energy

48.97%

Predicted Energy Use Intensity
(pEUI) reduction

ALL

of the firm’s top-performing projects were designed with energy-modeling software

Energy-modeled Projects

Today, more than 1,350 firms are signatories of the commitment, and 490 of them are reporting data, but the average predicted energy use intensity (pEUI) reduction is only 50 percent from the 2003 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) baseline—a benchmark allowing projects to compare against a national average by building typology. According to Architecture 2030’s challenge, we should have achieved an 80 percent reduction by 2023 and a 90 percent reduction this year. Well, actually, Architecture 2030 revised its initial target, arguing that carbon-neutrality should have been achieved by 2021, a year now in the rearview mirror. If more evidence of urgency is needed, the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report shows that, even in the lowest emissions scenarios, there is a 50 percent likelihood of exceeding the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold between 2030 and 2035. Drastic changes are needed⁠—⁠now.

When Perkins Eastman signed onto the commitment in 2014, we had no in-house, practice-wide sustainability support. The following year, we built a team and rolled out a reporting process for 2030 because we needed to know where we were before we could begin to make reductions. We established energy modeling guidance documents for project teams—and started to introduce training. For a firm our size (939 PEople), it was challenging to gather the information needed to assess every project, and it took us years to get there, but by 2019, we were reporting close to 100 percent of our portfolio. In 2020, we created a 10-year plan to meet our 2030 goals, with an initial focus on ramping up energy modeling. Building code updates are starting to drive up the bottom, but not nearly as quickly as needed to meet the challenge. If all our projects are conducting energy modeling across our firm, we know higher energy reduction is more easily achievable.

So where are we? Our 2023 dataset hit a 48.97 percent pEUI reduction from the 2003 CBECS baseline, plateauing over the previous four years. However, we have made strides in increasing our energy modeling, with 49 percent of our whole-building projects providing modeling data. This has helped: more of our projects met the 2030 Challenge target in 2023 than ever in the past, with 37 of our 299 projects meeting or exceeding the current challenge target for the year, and 12 of them targeting net zero energy.

Charting a Course to 2030

Educational projects are leading the 2030 charge, meeting the challenge at an exponential rate within both our K-12 Education and College + University practice areas. Some of this can be attributed to changing jurisdictional regulations, such as the Greener Government Buildings Amendment Act of 2022 in Washington, DC, which requires net zero for all publicly funded buildings (including schools), and the updated stretch code in Massachusetts that sets thermal energy and Passive House-level requirements. However, before these more aggressive jurisdictional regulations came into play, we were already seeing progress among our education clients; sustainability has become deeply connected to their missions, and many of them have developed climate commitments either individually (higher education institutions) or as part of their community commitments (public school districts). Certainly the school building typology lends itself very neatly to achieving these goals as well, with oftentimes low energy demands paired with larger roof expanses and nearby fields to accommodate renewable technology, but another factor is the evolving cultural component in our studios. The more experience our teams gain in delivering high-performance projects, the more it becomes embedded in their design thinking and processes regardless of market sector, client goals, or jurisdictional requirements.

Energy modeling, when done well, is starting to provide more valuable input for our teams at the right time in the process, and we have found the most successful energy modeling plan pairs rapid in⁠-⁠house energy modeling with more skilled or extensive out-of-house modeling conducted by consultants. Even in our developer-driven project typologies, we have seen mindsets changing. Some of this can be attributed to the increased availability of funding and incentives in recent years for the green transition, specifically through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, essentially making it cost neutral or cost negative to invest in higher performance systems. Nothing spurs change in a capitalist society more than money.

We can and should celebrate and learn from our successes, but we are not in this for a participation trophy. We are at the point where we need to catapult forward. This year, we are embedding new layers into our design processes to drive change, and we intend to be agile in identifying successes and failures along the way. We are requiring project teams to conduct an energy model on all building-scale projects. By not accepting code compliance as our minimum, we gain a better picture of where we stand as a firm and the remaining progress we need to make, but more importantly, we will arm our designers with valuable data to inform their design decisions. Moving forward, we are looking at other requirements to layer into our design processes, such as drafting up a carbon-neutral option from day one and looking at the envelope and system selections as a combined unit to break down the cost barrier associated with high performance. With each new layer in our processes, we are fostering a cultural shift—one in which we lead our clients to carbon neutrality, because it is our responsibility as the experts in the room to do so.

While we are at it, we also need to stop glorifying glass boxes. They are the opposite of good design. Newsflash: our feet do not need a view, our eyes do, and the most important glass for daylighting is at the ceiling, where it can be drawn deeper inside. Rooting our definition of good design in basic passive design principles should be a priority for the global AEC industry. Passive design (and a reasonable window-to-wall ratio) is the key to unlocking high-performance, cost-effective solutions that create better quality indoor environments for all.

Redoubling Our Efforts

The time for the simple steps outlined in the 2030 Challenge has come and gone. We cannot afford to plateau, and we certainly cannot afford to relinquish our climate action efforts. As proposed by architect Doug Farr of Farr Associates during the Phius Passive Building Summit at Greenbuild 2024, we need to kick the carbon habit as a global community faster than our long goodbye to cigarettes (starting in the 1980s), if we want to have any hope of reining in our spiraling climate disaster.

We have very nearly exceeded the global temperature rise threshold and are already experiencing the impacts of climate change—increasingly severe and frequent wildfires, landslides, hurricanes, flooding, and more. It is no longer a question of if we will exceed the threshold; it is a question of by how much, and can we stop the bleeding? We cannot continue to politicize this issue. It is negatively affecting the daily lives of countless people around the world. It is a livelihood issue, an economic issue, and a life-or-death issue.

However, the new administration in Washington is taking significant steps backward, which means the private sector must step up, as we’ve done in the past. The America Is All In initiative is a great example of like-minded, forward-thinking companies confronting climate change as the public sector retreats. Meeting our 2030 commitment is critically important. Even as climate deniers are sowing uncertainty in the technology needed to replace fossil fuels, we have been consistently designing NZE buildings left and right. Years ago, when the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency added Passive House into its incentives, it found there was a slight cost premium in the first two years, but by the third year the higher performing buildings were coming in cheaper per square foot than conventional construction. Just because the federal incentives disappear, doesn’t mean we are going to design low-performing buildings. As outlined in a recent CleanTechnica article highlighting the growth of solar energy, the green economy will continue to move ahead regardless of the political landscape. Private sector firms, including our practice, must take the lead. Perkins Eastman’s Human by Design ethos compels us to support and repair a healthy interdependence between people and planet, because design matters and we play an important role.

If the architectural community continues to separate sustainability from design—as something that can be selected (or not selected) by the client—we are never going to reach our 2030 goal. We need to stop asking for permission to integrate sustainability. We need to just do it, regardless of client, project typology, budget, or schedule. No excuses. As Ed Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030, so aptly states in his recent Architectural Record article, “when vision aligns with action, the power to change the world lies within the hands of those who design it.” That’s us—and it’s time to change the world. N