The RE-CUGI project promotes low carbon development for sustainable, lively and resilient communities through quantifying carbon impacts of neighbourhoods and its associative infrastructure. Currently carbon is calculated mainly for buildings only and not for associative infrastructure and transport.
Every square meter of a constructed home adds approximately 600 to 1400 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (kgCO2e). This is before the carbon cost of each car parking space, the linear metre of road, water and utility infrastructure needed to serve these dwellings is counted.
The RE-CUGI project builds on the research project Viable Homes, which for the first time in the Irish context quantified the carbon cost of infrastructure, in addition to the dwellings themselves. The Viable Homes guide and report showed that the optimisation of newly built areas and the efficiency of infrastructure per dwelling must play a critical role in reducing carbon emissions at the early design stage before material selection is considered.
In RE-CUGI, tools are being trialled such as the PLACE tool which is a pre-planning and planning, liveability and carbon quantification tool useful to planners, policymakers, developers, green finance providers and building design professionals interested in evaluating potential sites and situating low carbon developments.
Low carbon development relates to multiple actions in the Climate Action Plan including those addressing the implementation of the National Planning Framework and the main aim of RE-CUGI is to make the case for the low carbon development in Ireland’s villages, towns and cities.
The research and tools support the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2021 which commits to:
- reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 51% by 2030,
- codify annual carbon budgets and sectoral ceilings,
- mandate the yearly production of a Climate Action Plan
- introduce a requirement for Local Authorities to prepare individual climate action plans
The RE-CUGI project is a collaboration between UCD and IGBC and funded by the SEAI Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland grant no RDD850
We’re looking to create carbon benchmarks for different building typologies, if you have a building that was built recently and can share the bills of quantities and construction drawings, please email Brian Crowley at [email protected]
