New funding won to help China create zero carbon developments

20.07.2011

We are pleased to announce that BioRegional has just won funding from the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office Global Prosperity Fund to help shape supportive policies for low and zero carbon community real estate projects in Chongqing, south west China.

Our Chongqing based team will work in partnership with Vanke, China’s largest real estate developer, to review existing institutional, technical and economic barriers to achieving two emissions reduction scenarios: net zero carbon (in line with the One Planet Common International Target) and a 45% reduction (in line with China’s 12th Five Year Plan targets).
                       
Having identified the barriers the team will then model what support mechanisms would be necessary to enable a real estate project to be commercially viable when meeting the emissions reduction targets. Evidence-based draft policies will then be developed with Chongqing Municipal Government and applied to three low carbon demonstration projects (including BioRegional’s planned Chongqing One Planet Community) in order for policy makers to assess practical feasibility. The findings will be publicly available in Spring 2012.

BioRegional developed the project in response to two existing barriers limiting the growth of low carbon communities in China’s rapid urbanization. Firstly, the perception amongst real estate developers and government that low carbon communities are commercially unviable; secondly, the absence of effective policies which support low carbon real estate development. The importance of sustainable urbanization for China is put into context by the scale of development, for example the urban population is estimated to expand by 350million by 2025 and 40 billion m2 of new floor space will be constructed to accommodate this growth. By tackling these barriers we hope to accelerate the construction of low carbon communities in Chongqing.