Incentives of the built world

We spend 90% of our time indoors. Our buildings are critical to human health, happiness, and productivity.

And to address climate change, we’ll need to rethink the building sector, too.

Buildings contribute 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions annually. To achieve our net zero emissions target by 2050, we need to reduce and even remove emissions related to the embodied, operational, and end-of-life emissions in buildings.

However— I believe that one of the most pervasive impediments to our local and global growth is our lack of understanding of the complex systems that shape our infrastructure. This deficit massively inhibits innovation. It leads to time wasted debating what is and isn’t infrastructure, it fosters demand-side stopgaps without factoring in supply-side solutions, and it misses opportunities to find simple patterns that dance with complexity for bigger gains— relying on brute force local maxima instead. 

The Build Incentive newsletter explores the hidden complex systems of our built infrastructure and their impact to climate and public health.

The thing is: these learnings are not specific to the building industry. Lessons in establishing supply/demand-side markets, creating the right incentives (regulatory, commercial, behavioral), implementing technologies for ongoing maintenance, and communicating change to varying interest groups bring benefit across multiple sectors.

Let’s learn to build incentive.

For more, visit https://buildincentive.com/