Category: Industry Good News

Whichever side of the subjective city-versus-rural debate you’re on, the objective laws of thermodynamics dictate that cities lose on at least one front: They tend to get insufferably hotter, more so than surrounding rural areas. That’s thanks to the urban heat-island effect, in which buildings and roads readily absorb the sun’s energy and release it well into the night. The greenery of rural areas, by contrast, provides shade and cools the air by releasing water.

Climate change is making the urban heat-island effect all the more dire in cities across the world, and it’s only going to get worse. Like, way worse. An international team of researchers has used a new modeling technique to estimate that by the year 2100, the world’s cities could warm by as much as 4.4 degrees Celsius on average. For perspective, that figure obliterates the Paris agreement’s optimistic goal for a global average temperature rise of 1.5 degrees C from preindustrial levels. In fact, the team’s figure more than doubles the agreement’s hard goal of limiting that global rise to no more than 2 degrees C.

Up until this point, global climate models have tended to snub urban areas, and for good reason, as they make up just 3 percent of the planet’s land surface. Cities are but a blip. Researchers are more interested in the dynamics of things like the ocean, ice, and air currents. “We’re closing this kind of gap,” says Lei Zhao, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and lead author on a recent paper published in Nature Climate Change describing the modeling. “We provide urban-specific projections for the future.”

His team’s model suggests that hotter cities could be catastrophic for urban public health, which is already suffering from the effects of increasing heat. Between 2000 and 2016, according to the World Health Organization, the number of people exposed to heat waves jumped by 125 million, and extreme heat claimed more than 166,000 lives between 1998 and 2017. And while at the moment half the world’s population lives in urban areas, that proportion is expected to rise to 70 percent by 2050, according to the authors of this new paper. People in search of economic opportunity are unknowingly rushing into peril.

“When I read these papers, I just don’t know what’s wrong with humanity, to be honest with you. Because this is like the same song being sung by different people,” says climate scientist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who wasn’t involved in the work. “Come on, man! When are we going to get serious about this problem? This is another person ringing the bell. We just for some reason refuse to hear this thing.”

To calculate how much city temperatures might rise, Zhao and his colleagues from a number of institutions, including Princeton University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, built a statistical model for the climate of urban regions, focusing on changing temperatures and humidities. These two factors are the conspiring menaces of extreme heat: Our bodies respond to high temperatures by perspiring, which is more fancily known as evaporative cooling. But humidity makes this process less efficient, because the more moist the air is, the less readily it accepts evaporating sweat from our bodies. That’s why humid heat feels so much more uncomfortable than dry heat.

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The City of Houston recently approved tax incentives for businesses that install green stormwater infrastructure.

Property owners who construct green roofs, rain gardens, permeable pavement, and rainwater harvesting elements can have their property tax reduced. A facility would be eligible for a tax abatement if the project valuation is at least $3 million, with at least $200,000 of that for green stormwater infrastructure.

The value of the abatement could be 100% of the project’s valuation for the green stormwater infrastructure for up to 10 years. Thus, a $3 million project with $200,000 worth of green stormwater infrastructure could save the owner $20,000 annually.

One city council member told the Houston Chronicle that he would like to extend the program to include residential property owners.

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Construction & Infrastructure review: The key to recovery

2020 was a tumultuous year, no one could have foreseen the rapid changes the country underwent in March and April and the impact the COVID-19 would have.

Inevitably, construction performance dipped as the country went into lockdown, with figures taking a huge knock. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics for the period to August 2020 indicated that infrastructure was the only element of the wider construction and infrastructure sector to have returned to pre-pandemic levels of output, with infrastructure output in August 0.6% higher than in February. This was achieved thanks to a 10.9% increase in output in the three months to August 2020 compared with the previous three months.

While the sector has, inevitably, been affected by the ongoing economic uncertainty, the outlook remains positive, with housing being a major factor in recovery. According to the latest figures released in December, IHS/CIPS* PMI marketing activity showed sustained recovery across the construction sector, with the latest index recording 54.7, up from 53.1 in October and registering above the 50.0 no change value for the sixth consecutive month.

For infrastructure, the outlook overall is good, with Civil Engineering returning to growth in November, registering at 52.3.

Figures published by the Office for National Statistics in December for UK construction output**, show that, whilst the pandemic is still having a biting effect across much of industry, construction is steadily recovering. The latest figures record that construction output grew by 1.0% in the month-on-month all work series in October 2020. Increases were seen in both new work (0.3%) and repair and maintenance (2.3%); which helped the figures rise to £13,066M. This is the sixth consecutive month of growth for construction output, but the smallest monthly increase in that time.

The long-term effects of the pandemic and current lockdowns and tiered areas can still be seen, however, with the figures still well below pre-lockdown figures – by some 6.4%.

All sectors of the industry saw growth in October, apart from private new housing and private commercial new work. The only sector to recover completely is infrastructure, which is now recording output levels above the April decline.

The figures show that both infrastructure and public other new work were both more resilient to the lockdown effect, showing smaller drops in work at the beginning of the crisis and consistent growth ever since, albeit relatively small.

The construction industry as a whole has shown its resilience to the changes, bouncing back to growth under extraordinary circumstances where other industries have struggled.

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