The Biggest Building Boom in History

What successful, large-scale, global climate action will look like

I’ve written and given a lot of talks on how building a sustainably prosperous global economy is an opportunity — a set of investments that will leave us better off, even while we avoid the worst of the planetary crisis we face.

It’s only now becoming clear what the scale of that opportunity is. It is only now easy to see that a giant building boom is what successful climate action looks like.

The Guardian reported last week on a new study saying that over the next 15 years, to meet our climate goals, we’ll need to shift $90 trillion worth of new infrastructure spending to low- or zero-carbon models,

As the study’s authors say:

“Investing in sustainable infrastructure is key to tackling the three central challenges facing the global community: reigniting growth, delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals, and reducing climate risk in line with the Paris Agreement. Transformative change is needed now in how we build our cities, produce and use energy, transport people and goods, and manage our landscapes. And the challenge is urgent.”

This infrastructure spending is on top of rising urban populations demanding as many as a billion more homes by 2030 (according to McKinsey and U.N. Habitat), requiring “$9 trillion to $11 trillion in construction spending alone.”

And then there’s the huge investments we now know we’ll need to make to ruggedize the world’s cities and protect their people from rising sea levels, worsening storms, heat waves and droughts — the bill for which I’ve seen estimated as high as $20 trillion, or more.

All of these investments are opportunities — not only for entrepreneurs, workers and investors — but for communities themselves. They are chances to right old wrongs, to make cities fairer, more livable, more beautiful. It is the very scale of the changes needed that makes the next 15 years such a potential inflection point in human history.

But we need to imagine the awesome urban futures such a transformation could give us… because we can’t build what we can’t imagine.