The Decarbonizing the Built Environment through Heritage Toolkit
(Coming Soon)
The Decarbonizing the Built Environment through Heritage Toolkit aims to support policymakers, practitioners, communities, and heritage advocates in accelerating the rapid uptake of heritage-informed decarbonization strategies through policy. It includes:
An overview of the key policies, stakeholders, and approaches that contribute to heritage-informed decarbonization
Key principles founded in heritage to drive built environment decarbonization, with context about why they matter in today’s landscape and how to adapt them to a local community context
Global examples of heritage informed decarbonization in action, from buildings and practices to tools and policies
Recommendations for key levers to integrate heritage principles into building sector climate policies and include climate change mitigation into heritage policies.
What’s in the Toolkit
The toolkit includes a range of references, resources, and actionable guidance to accelerate heritage-informed decarbonization solutions through building sector policy at all scales.
-
includes foundational content and establishes a common language for heritage-informed decarbonization through a definition of the subject, and glossary, and an overview of the policies and people who contribute to scaling success.
-
offer five lessons demonstrated by heritage solutions that advance environmental and cultural benefits hand-in-hand. Prioritized policy levers, illustrations of successful policy examples, and community engagement prompts are included for each principle to guide high-impact advocacy.
-
of heritage-informed decarbonization illustrate examples of successful buildings, programs, and policies from around the world. Each case explores the cultural and political contexts that led to success, the co-benefits that resulted, and how the learnings of each case apply more broadly.
Sample Cases of HID
The architecture and design firm Masons Ink has facilitated grassroots initiatives in Bengaluru, India, to empower women in the construction industry through the development of specialized knowledge and skills in sustainable building practices. They have provided training for women in construction with low-carbon heritage materials, including earth and bamboo, and brought together all-women mason teams to realize their architectural projects alongside the client, site architect, and a community researcher. Combating biases of both women in construction and earth-based materials, Masons Ink has synergized environmentally sustainable construction with social empowerment and gender parity.
National University of Singapore renovated its 1970s College of Design and Environment Buildings 1 and 3 (built 1976 and 1973) through a net-zero energy adaptive reuse project, earning WELL Certification for adaptive reuse while cutting embodied carbon to an estimated two-thirds of comparable new construction. The design targeted circulation and daylighting shortcomings and combined passive and “intelligent” building strategies across 23,000 m2, including angled bronze panels to reduce heat gain while admitting daylight, more than 2,000 rooftop solar panels, operable windows for natural ventilation, and hybrid cooling (ceiling fans plus air conditioning) across over 65% of the area to lower operational carbon. The resulting campus “living lab” demonstrates low-carbon renovation at scale, supporting a broader shift toward decarbonization in the built environment and drawing substantial interest through building tours for students, professionals, and officials.
The City of San Antonio’s pioneering deconstruction and salvage policy demonstrates a municipal approach to develop regulatory mechanisms and accompanying initiatives to establish training and review processes. The program thus preserves pieces of built cultural heritage while reducing the quantity of materials sent to landfills. It also reduces demand for new construction materials and associated embodied carbon investment.