Better Climate Festival 2022: Preparing an industry ecosystem to meet carbon targets

This year, Indonesia as the host of the intergovernmental G20 (Group of Twenty) forum is under the global spotlight. As a parallel event to the G20, Green Building Council (GBC) Indonesia held Better Climate Festival 2022 throughout August to November 2022, a series of events that included student competitions, awards for sustainable construction materials and a seminar about applying Green strategies in the context of Indonesia. With the theme Sustainable Finance for Net Zero Green Building: Opportunities, Challenges and Implementation, the seminar on 30 August invited practitioners as well as those from the government and Green organisations to speak.

Fostering a robust Green ecosystem

As cost is still perceived as hindering Green building adoption, Iwan Prijanto, Chairperson of GBC Indonesia stated in his presentation: “In 2021, 80 per cent of global sustainable fund flows into the Europe, and 15 per cent to US, with less than five per cent to rest of the world. Why is that?” He posited that the expected industry ecosystem to receive—and successfully operate—sustainable funds in certain countries are “not complete, not adequate and not reliable.”

Contrary to common perception, the highest emissions in Indonesia’s building sector are from households—not commercial buildings. This is because the volume of the housing sector alone is massive, considering the country’s 280 million population compared to its commercial districts.

“A majority of commitments are from the supply side: energy, agriculture and forestry, but we rarely touch upon the demand side, including urban buildings, transportation and industry,” Prijanto said. “Lowering the demand is less ‘sexy’ than generating renewable energy. But the trajectory should be to lower demand first before talking about the supply side.”

Prijanto hopes that Indonesia could have robust and massive programmes to reduce demands, drawing an analogy to the issue of fossil fuel consumption. “People are busy discussing about how best to subsidise fuel, but it is seldom touched upon about how [excessively] we are consuming fuel. The control of fossil fuel consumption should come as the priority before touching upon subsidies.

“When we talk about net-zero building, we are often stuck about the buildings in themselves, but what we need to radically change are all three ‘pillars’—the human resource and organisational aspect; buildings; and financials—supported by policy and regulation, knowledge, awareness and mindset.”

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