Regenerative Development over Time
Adopting regenerative development as New Zealand’s preferred approach to its built environment will take time, and will likely happen in phases.
A five-year time period fits within a conventional, lowest-cost approach to buildings. A 40-year time period relates more closely to The Treasury’s Capital Asset Management framework whole-of-life approach to asset management. An 80-year time period relates to the average life of a building and a reasonable expectation of a human lifespan in New Zealand.
Short term – five years (to 2013)
There is increasing urgency to reduce and reverse the negative environmental impacts, especially for tackling human-induced climate change. As discussed, eco-efficiency is already rapidly transforming business-as-usual and is valuable in the short term to reduce the built environment’s impacts while other more long-term strategies are developed and tested.
The short term offers opportunities to develop partnerships to increase the number of projects based on regenerative development and use these to develop in-depth case studies and examples to help demonstrate its benefits. This will help refine regenerative design concepts, methods and processes to fit the New Zealand context.
Progress going forward could take several forms:
- regenerative development may be applied to individual projects to eventually transform the built environment in a building-by-building or development-by-development way
- alternatively, concepts could be applied to neighbourhoods, larger developments, sections of cities or new towns to more effectively demonstrate the benefits of regenerative development.
Medium term – 40 years (to 2048)
In the medium term, eco-efficiency may become less viable. Comprehensive arguments for phasing out an eco-efficiency approach and replacing it with the other approaches are in the full research document (Rethinking built environments: Towards a sustainable future).
In brief, a potentially rapid change in human settlement patterns could occur due to climate change, and also because of continuing urbanisation, population increase, and diminished resources, such as oil, water and metals. This may demand a different approach to the built environment that goes beyond efficiencies and towards positive environmental effects.
Furthermore, increased legislation and changing social expectations could require the use of energy sources and building materials that are beneficial to the environment. This may push designers away from eco-efficiency towards regenerative development.
Simply put, urgency in addressing environmental degradation may determine that regenerative concepts become necessary strategies. Along with the positive environmental and human benefits already discussed, a more robust built environment will have significant economic advantages, particularly as the impacts of climate change are likely to increase during this time.
Long term – 80 years (to 2088) +
In the long term, a regenerative approach to the built environment, which integrates with ecosystems, will more likely ensure a suitable environment for humans and other species. Over the extra long term, such an approach to development may strengthen ecosystems and reverse or repair environmental damage from current and past human patterns of living.
