Narratives of innovation that address climate change agenda in the construction sector

Abstract

This chapter explores narratives of innovation that address the challenges faced in the construction sector and associated firms in meeting climate change targets. Innovation is important to meet the targets, and there is an urgency reflected within continuously developing global strategies and policy initiatives. In this way, innovation must be sustainable with the specific objective to reduce carbon emissions in countries – we refer to this as ‘sustainable innovation’. There is a temporal connection within the urgency to set ambitious climate change targets with specific deadlines and the need for industries like the construction sector to act. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change advocates the necessity for countries to set targets to limit global warming to less than 2° Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. Countries have set targets to meet emission goals with key years being 2020, 2030 and 2050. At the Paris climate conference (COP21) in December 2015, 195 countries, including Norway and the UK, adopted the first universally, legally binding global climate deal, which comes into effect in 2020. These continuous timelines to meet global/national goals to reduce emissions require support from industries such as the construction sector. Norway and UK are countries heavily promoting sustainable innovation to meet the construction sector targets set by policy. Since 2010, EU directives have guided the construction sector towards sustainability in Norway and the UK. In this chapter, we focus on this interaction process between climate change targets at the policy level and the action/reaction of the construction sector firms, both owners/clients and suppliers/main contractors. We also look into the way narratives of innovation are continuously promoted in textual forms – in Norway with the focus on working towards (nearly) ‘zero emissions’ and in the UK with the focus on ‘low carbon’. Although maybe labelled differently in each country, we use the term sustainable innovation as the most commonly used in both contexts.