Successive cabinets have the ambition to build 100,000 homes a year. The emphasis is on speed and affordability. The Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Rli) notes in its advisory report "Building with a Future" that attention to the sustainability of housing is being pushed into the background. This is striking, because the Netherlands also wants to be climate neutral by 2050. The council warns that if homes continue to be built with conventional materials, such as concrete and steel, for too long, there is a chance that the Netherlands will find itself in a new building crisis.
At the same time, the council is hopeful: after all, more and more parties are already building homes from sustainable materials. In its advisory report, the Rli calls on the incoming cabinet to encourage a switch to sustainable use of materials, so that fast and affordable construction will continue to be possible in the near future. The advisory report was received today on behalf of Minister Mona Keijzer of Housing and Spatial Planning by Chris Kuijpers, Secretary General and Director General of Housing and Construction.
Meaningful CO2 emissions from material use in residential construction
Part of our national CO2 emissions come from the use of conventional building materials in residential construction. This accounts for about 5% of Dutch emissions. A rapid shift to the use of climate-friendly materials such as wood, bio-based insulation materials and preserved concrete is needed to meet the climate goals endorsed by the government.
Financiers and EU call for climate-neutral housing construction
The shift to building homes with sustainable building materials is inevitable as investors and investors increasingly demand it. Moreover, the Netherlands has agreed in a European context to set limits on CO2 emissions from newly built homes starting in 2030. To this end, EU member states must draw up a roadmap with limit and target values for CO2 emissions throughout the lifetime of homes. The ambition is to reduce emissions to zero by 2050. It is important that the construction chain quickly learns to build with sustainable materials in order to comply with the limit and target values that will offer less and less leeway over time, and that will prevent a construction crisis after 2030.
Demand for homes made of sustainable materials must rise
Some of the parties in the construction chain are already taking surprisingly big steps toward sustainable housing construction. They are showing that building with sustainable materials is already possible, and, contrary to the prevailing mantra, can also be affordable and faster. Despite this hopeful development, a larger number of parties are still waiting for more government guidance. As a result, sustainable building materials lack sufficient demand, preventing their production from benefiting from scale-up advantages currently reserved for conventional building materials. Also, sustainable materials and strategies such as reuse and low-installation construction, still experience many disadvantages from existing rules and procedures, which the government needs to update.
Standardizing and pricing
To get the entire construction chain moving, the council advocates that the central government provide direction. Using a combination of standardization and pricing, the national government should stimulate the demand for housing made from sustainable materials. Standardize, by steering with a sufficiently ambitious roadmap to reduce the climate impact of housing construction. In addition, as an extra incentive and to create a level playing field, the council advises the national government to introduce a levy on homes that do not meet the target values included in the roadmap.
Important bycatch
The shift to building with sustainable materials, which goes hand in hand with opportunities for factory-built housing, also leads to all kinds of positive "by-products," such as reduction of geopolitical dependencies, prospects for agriculture, higher labor productivity and better working conditions on the construction site.
