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The Chinese government has promised to cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45% by 2020, compared with 2005 levels, partly through low-carbon city projects.
After a trip to the BRE at Watford in 2011, soon-to-be-premier Li Keqiang reportedly demanded that the project be replicated in China. An Innovation Park is now being built in Beijing by property firm Vanke in collaboration with BRE and the Chinese government. And earlier this year, the housing and finance ministries announced subsidies for green buildings — a development that achieves three stars under the Chinese Three Star rating system will qualify for 80 yuan per m2 — plus a target for 30% of all new buildings to be certified as green by 2020.
Unlike LEED, Three Star requires post-occupancy evaluation, which is particularly significant in China due to the culture of corner-cutting, explains James Connelly, senior analyst at China Greentech Initiative, a network of companies and NGOs promoting clean-tech market opportunities in China. He points to Beijing’s Prosper Center, which won credits during the design phase for including showers on each floor for people who rode to work. But when it came to the interior fit-out, the developer dropped the showers to cut costs — despite the building retaining its LEED credits.
Above: eco housing in Nanjing. Below: Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, designed by SOM, claims to be the greenest super-tall building in the world
Private initiatives too are driving sustainable design. China Greentech Initiative is helping property firm Vantone determine the payback on a residential block of applying the features needed to meet Three Star standards. Like increasing numbers of Chinese projects, they are using Building Information Modelling (BIM), which is only now starting to penetrate China.
This is also in evidence on the campus of Tsinghua University, Beijing, where an energy efficiency research centre has been set up in partnership with Swire Properties. The academics work out how to apply sustainable features to new designs, improve performance of existing buildings, and test and commission equipment. “We then apply that to our projects,” explains Guy Bradley, chief executive of Swire’s mainland China operations. The exercise has cut both costs and emissions, he says: at the Sanlitun shopping centre in Beijing, more than 3.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent has been saved.
It isn’t all positive. Overlapping and vaguely defined green schemes (“eco-cities”, “low-carbon pilot zones”, “liveable cities”), ministries that don’t talk to each other and a failure to implement paper plans are affecting the green mission. In a recent evaluation of China’s designated low-carbon industrial parks by the US Institute for Sustainable Communities, none hit the pass mark of 60%.
One of the problems identified was a lack of understanding of what low carbon means. Lise Bertelsen, head of the UK-China Eco-cities and Green Building Group, which seeks to channel British expertise into the Chinese green building market, says: “When I’ve been in China, looking at what is ostensibly a ‘green’ city, [sometimes it] actually turns out to be something that has a lot of green trees, which frankly misses the point. But there is a real willingness to try to understand.”
