Feeling The Cool Breeze

Fraser place may someday loom large in the annals of environmental history. Completed in Shenzhen in 2005, the crescent-shaped service apartment is China's first green commercial building. The windows are designed to capture breezes, reducing the need for air conditioning. Rainwater runs off the roof and into an irrigation system for the surrounding gardens. With a combination of advanced design concepts, new technologies and safe materials, the building is healthy for its occupants, efficient for its owners and light on Mother Earth. The best measure of its success comes on the bottom line: it delivered $177,857 in energy savings during its first year in operation, compared with a similar-size conventional structure.

That puts Fraser Place and the handful of similar buildings in Asia at the center of today's climate debate. Asia's growing demand for energy is the main driver of $100-per-barrel oil, and makes it the hottest market for biofuels that threaten food supplies. Thanks to its metastasizing power grids, which rely mainly on coal-fired plants using technology from the 1950s, it is also the fastest-growing contributor to the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming. Clearly, China and India need cleaner power plants, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the fastest, cheapest way to reduce emissions is to build more energy-efficient cities, using proven green technologies. "Success in confronting climate change depends very heavily on how we house Asia," says Daniel Esty, Yale University environmental-law professor and coauthor of "Green to Gold." "This is a huge challenge but also a huge opportunity."

Why Asia? Because breakneck economic growth and the region's still-huge rural population make it the epicenter of urbanization in the 21st century. The challenge (as is so often the case in the region) lies in not repeating the West's developmental missteps. Rural-urban migration now lands millions of Asians a year in apartments replete with TVs, refrigerators and air conditioning. Every day more of them obtain the ultimate urban accessory: the automobile. If current patterns persist, by 2020 China alone will import half the world's coal, a fifth of its oil and will have 158 million cars on its roadways compared with just 30 million today.

The alternative: apply existing green building techniques—most of which are neither high tech nor costly—to grow healthier Asian cities. Doing so, most experts concur, could yield urban areas that consume 30 to 50 percent less energy than conventional cities, for a small additional construction cost. At a recent conference on sustainable building in Singapore, Ch? Wall, former chairman of the Australia-based World Green Building Council, said that "we have to recalibrate our thinking" about cities as smog-spewing symbols of environmental degradation. Cities, he argues, can be efficient, sustainable environments, especially when created based on sound ecological practices. They put people in closer proximity to their work, generate less energy-intensive economic growth and lend themselves to mass transportation. "The building sector is where the biggest opportunities lie," he says.

Today buildings account for roughly half of all energy consumption globally, and transport gobbles up an additional quarter. Both are rising in percentage terms (in contrast to industrial power use, which is falling) due to urbanization. Still, cities are potentially big energy savers. A recent study in The McKinsey Quarterly reviewed all the realistic ways of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, and found that 75 percent of the potential reductions either would result from broader use of proven technologies (insulation for buildings and hybrid technology for cars) or are not technology related (a well-designed building can save a lot of energy simply by the way it sits on the site, captures natural light and garners rainwater). It also found that green building is one of the cheapest ways to cut greenhouse emissions (and "clean coal" technologies are among the most expensive). Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that buildings account for almost half of all greenhouse-gas emissions; green-building advocates say better design and construction could cut this in half. "It is better to reduce demand through making buildings more energy-efficient than it is to try and 'solve' the clean-energy problem," says Jason Hainline, whose firm, EMSI, consulted on Fraser Place. "The first step always is to reduce demand through design. And in essence, that's free."

The global green-building boom owes much to the nation that refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and still carries a well-deserved reputation for resource gluttony, the United States. In Asia the clearest sign of American influence is the growing cache of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) awards, granted since 1998 by the U.S. Green Building Council. The system grades buildings for factors like indoor environmental quality, resource use and consumption of energy and water, and awards certifications that can raise the market value of buildings by up to 10 percent. "The [U.S.] Green Building Council's promotions have been very influential," says K. S. Wong, vice chairman of Hong Kong's equivalent body. "In terms of market perception, LEED is really seen as the global standard."