How can we make cities greener?

The world is increasingly urbanizing: today, half of humanity – 3.5 billion people – lives in cities and by 2050, two-thirds of the population will call a city home. As a result of this urbanization, our cities are growing by the minute. Every minute, we add 10,000 square meters of city space. Every five days, a new Paris. And every month, the equivalent of a New York City. With this trend, we need to rethink how our cities are designed, built and operated. Despite cities occupying only 3% of the world’s land, they have a huge environmental footprint. From energy consumption to construction and from transportation to industrial processes, cities account for 70% of global carbon emissions. These numbers are set to increase over the coming decades. To make our world work for everyone and improve quality of life for the many and not just a few, the Sustainable Development Goals recognize the need to build inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities.

To enhance sustainable urbanization, we need to look at the buildings and infrastructure that make up cities. By adopting a low-carbon and circular approach throughout the entire built environment’s life cycle, from materials production to construction, and from operation to the demolition phase, cities can become catalysts to contain climate change. New smart-designs for cities can even make them carbon negative. Building greener cities also means adopting nature-based solutions to promote sustainable lifestyles, improve wellbeing and tackle challenges, such as air pollution, rising temperatures, flood risk and biodiversity loss. To ensure sustainable urbanization, we need to reduce cities’ adverse environmental impact by switching to a circular economy approach and by decoupling growth from the consumption of finite resources, reducing the use of materials, keeping materials in use as long as possible and recycling waste.

At Holcim, climate action is at the core of our strategy. We are working on four critical growth levers to accelerate the transition to net zero. First, we offer the world’s broadest range of green solutions, like ECOPact green concrete and ECOPlanet green cement, making low-carbon construction possible at scale. With our building solutions, like Airium, an energy-saving insulating foam, and Hydromedia, a permeable concrete that absorbs rainwater, we contribute to build greener cities. Second, we enable smart design, from green and insulating roofs to 3D printing, to significantly reduce the environmental footprint of buildings and infrastructure. Third, we drive the circular economy across everything we do, from recycling construction and demolition waste into new building products to powering our sites with energy drawn from materials at the end of their lifecycle. Lastly, we introduce new technologies, like carbon capture, usage and storage, to not only offer greener products to builders, but to decarbonize the way we make them. Here you can read more about Holcim’s transition to net zero.

Holcim is proud to support the Lead 2030 Challenge for SDG 11.

This Challenge aims to find and support solutions that make cities greener by pushing the boundaries of sustainable construction and urbanization. The challenge welcomes solutions from young innovators that:

• Deploy innovative and sustainable building materials and solutions that are affordable and scalable to enable low-carbon, circular, carbon neutral and even carbon negative cities.
• Increase access to sustainable infrastructure, from green mobility to green energy.
• Promotes sustainable lifestyles connecting nature and cities.
• Drive circular economy approaches to enable more recycling.