ABSTRACT
The tragedy of the commons, a phenomenon that describes the depletion of shared resources by individuals acting in their self-interest, is a key driver of climate change economics. Adopting science-based carbon emission targets and scenarios in the built environment can promote ambitious decarbonisation and align with the goals of the Paris Agreement, ultimately leading to near-zero emissions. We applied four interesting scenario methods to estimate and validate decarbonisation with respect to energy, water, and materials efficiency in a residential building pilot real estate project in Nigeria. The scenarios were aimed at catalysing circular economy (CE) business principles in the real estate sector. By doing so, we adopted a sectoral decarbonisation strategy to achieve a fair reduction in carbon emissions by the year 2100, that is, corresponding to the two-degrees Celsius (2DC) scenario. The estimated future carbon emissions/unit were accounted for, and the different cases reflect four income levels. Similar designs are also adopted to those recent residential real estate proposals in Nigeria, based on the trending conventions in architectural design concepts. These are geared towards making CO2 savings by matching global material, energy, and water use baselines. In this research, we find that for 2050, the forecasted material, energy, and water measures meet the 20% savings required by the Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiency (EDGE) standard. To combat evident local climate change depicted by Global Historical Climatology Network monthly (GHCNM) data from 15 metrological stations found in Nigeria, the authors recommend that Circular Building Label (CBL) should be adopted in the real estate sector to reward the full implementation of these novel scenario methods for residential buildings, to help achieve 2DC.
