Leadership Spotlight: Vivian Loftness, SSC Steering Committee Co-Chair
This interview is part of a series of blog posts highlighting prominent members of our Smart Surfaces team. Over the coming months, we will publish interviews with Coalition members as they talk about their work, our environment and the Smart Surfaces mission.
Vivian Loftness is Co-Chair of the Smart Surfaces Coalition Steering Committee. Loftness received her BS and Masters of Architecture from MIT, and is a professor and former Head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. She has received widespread recognition for her research and teachings on environmental design and sustainability, and has served on twelve National Academy of Science panels. In addition to her work with the Coalition, she is a National Board member of the American Institute of Architects, the International Living Futures Institute, and has served on the U.S. Green Building Council’s Board of Directors, among others.
ME: What has been your role with the Smart Surfaces Coalition?
VL: Greg and I've known each other for at least 20 years. The focus of both of our work asks the question, “how do you justify investing in better built environments?” I've been an active partner with Greg's initiative to create the Smart Surface Coalition, co-chairing the leadership group with him, and providing an academic home for the Smart Surface initiative. With graduate students, I have been gathering the research that links a taxonomy of Smart Surface choices to critical outcomes — heat island and flooding reduction, increased livability and biodiversity — to try to make the case for Smart Surfaces.
ME: At what point in your career did you become involved with environmental issues?
VL: I was in high school during the first major energy crisis in 1970. It was a crazy moment for all of us. We thought the world was coming to an end because we were so used to being able to depend on endless oil and all of a sudden oil was running out. It precipitated Earth Day today, and catalyzed every high school student across America.
ME: What role does the field of architecture and the building sector play in the fight against climate change?
VL: Buildings and Infrastructures are critical to fighting climate change, but you might never know this. When you do a Google search on end-use energy and end-use carbon, you’ll find diagrams that claim that of greenhouse gas emissions, 27% belong to electric power, 28% belong to transportation, and 23% belong to industry. The residential and commercial sectors are broken into two pieces, and even together they’re only 13%. They take every function in the building that uses electricity — computers, plug loads, appliances, lights, cooling — and assign it to the electric power industry. And it drives me nuts. Absolutely critically nuts. Because electric power is not an end-use sector; it’s a source sector, just like the gas industry.
I created a new graphic for the National Academy Committee on Decarbonizing the US by 2050, dropping electric power as an end-use sector. If you take all those electric loads and put them back in the sectors where they actually are consumed, you'll see that buildings are 32% of the problem, transportation is 28%, and industry is now 29%. So now we can see the real problem. Do buildings matter? Yes!
McKinsey did a study in 2015 to map the greenhouse gas abatement cost curve. In other words, they mapped where it makes the most sense to spend your money if you're trying to reduce carbon. Investing in buildings pays for itself, as shown in green. My gosh, put your money here! Architecture plays such a big role.
Left: a typical pie chart graphic showing greenhouse gas emissions by sector, with electricity classified as an end-use sector. Right: Vivian’s updated graphic, re-classifying electric power as a source, and assigning its emissions to other end-use sectors. Under this classification, buildings jump from 13% to 38% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
A 2015 McKinsey study for the IECC measured the cost-effectiveness of various carbon mitigation strategies. Investments in the buildings sector, highlighted in green, are among the most cost-effective.
ME: What policy changes do you hope to see in the buildings sector in the future that could help?
VL: I absolutely think investment in the building sector will dramatically reduce our carbon footprint and create jobs. We should be investing in renewables to the max, creating sustainable jobs, and helping to address the economic crisis of COVID-19. We should be training coal workers to erect solar panels and wind towers. We should be investing in a lot of distributed solar, but also a lot of distributed conservation. I think we absolutely need to have both subsidy and policy, combined with job training to quickly take operational and embodied carbon out of the built environment.
ME: What are the most pressing problems we face right now, and how can Smart Surfaces address them?
VL: Infrastructure investment is being made all the time, but in the wrong direction. Regions are literally putting in more dark paving, putting in more dark roofs, cutting down trees, or letting them die. We’re losing out on natural cooling, because we’re over paved, and the pavement creates warming. We’re losing out on the natural absorption of soils to take on heavy rains, so we have flooding and runoff. We face human health consequences, because flooding can dump sewage in waterways. We also face serious inequity, because of course the neighborhoods that are being flooded are the low-lying neighborhoods, which are often the poor neighborhoods, which are also the ones that are heavily paved. It's a vicious circle.
We’re finally coming to grips with, “what have we done?” and “how long have we done this?” We’re facing a quadruple whammy: climate change, COVID-19 and human health, joblessness, and serious inequity. And I think we’re at a moment in time when Smart Surfaces can address this quadruple whammy with a cohesive plan. Smart Surfaces are a new generation of roofs, streets and sidewalks, parking lots and green spaces.
Let’s start in the neighborhoods that have had the worst inequity; let’s start to heal places that we have under-funded. We can change the temperature of the city by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit by implementing reflective and light-colored surfaces and increasing green space and tree canopy. That’s huge. Smart Surfaces can also address flooding problems that occur from sea level rise and deluge rainfall. Introducing Smart Surfaces creates jobs and solves the challenges of climate change. I think it’s magical what we can do. We can shift from the painful landscape of edge-to-edge concrete to something that is truly bucolic.
ME: What is the importance of the term “Smart Surfaces?”
VL: “Smart Surfaces” is not the most intuitive term, but it may be the catchiest term to get mayors and city leaders to say, "let's do Smart Surfaces." It might be easier for them to say that than just say, "let's do light surfaces," or "let's do reflective surfaces," or "high-albedo surfaces," which may be too obscure. It's not the perfect term, but I think it is maybe catchy enough that once people get what it means, they go, "Yes, I want to do that!"
ME: How do you think we can change people’s thinking on climate change and motivate real change?
VL: You have to get beyond the energy story. Energy matters, but we have to get to the carbon story, the global warming story, the human health and productivity story. We've got to get beyond the energy efficiency story because you can't pay for what we want with energy efficiency alone. This is triple bottom line thinking, also known as the three E's — economy, environment, and equity —, or the three P’s — profit, planet, and people. Both frameworks remind people that you can financially calculate three iterative values for our investments. If we start to pull all the threads, sometimes we can convince people to act on things that are not just in the profit column. And that's what the Smart Surfaces analytic engine is trying to do. It's saying: Here's the financial cost of putting in tree canopy or putting in light colored roofs, but look at all these financial capital, natural capital and human capital benefits. You're trying to account for every benefit.
ME: What does Smart Surfaces bring to the environmental space that is new or critical at this time? Why should foundations and policy-makers care?
VL: There are four things that are new about this. Number one, understanding this as a package of decisions, and recognizing that it's all the surfaces together that are having such a devastating impact. Number two, it’s quantifying beyond the financial capital, quantifying the planetary and human benefits and putting them into financial terms — which is exactly what the analytical engine does. And number three, it is absolutely a Coalition of people who can go out like wildfire and get every mayor and city planner up to speed fast. And number four, it's of course the carbon impact that could be had in less than 10 years. I think Smart Surfaces is exactly the right set of critical goals for city leaders right now.
We're at a threshold now where the clarity of the agenda for the Smart Surface Coalition, the power of a coalition of members, and the quantification of the engine — is at a perfect point to really get widespread adoption, if it can get in the doors of all the decision makers. Getting a revolution to be on everyone's tongue takes a lot of voices.
ME: Where do you fall on a scale from hopeful to terrified when it comes to potential for efforts to successfully slow climate change?
VL: I am terrified. On a global scale, I’m terrified because the changes that are occurring in Africa and Asia and in the Middle East and in South America, and in parts of the U.S., and of course the ice caps, are irreversible. If you take a tropical rainforest and turn it into desert, it’s done. Nature would eventually take it back, but it would take thousands of years. So I am terrified at what’s happening on a global scale.
But I’m hopeful that even though there’s less than 30 years for us to get this right, that a lot of the answers are on the shelf and ready. If we are convinced that this is going to be our solution to four challenges at the same time, I think we can make it in 30 years, so that we as a nation are carbon-neutral. And if we can help other nations as well, we do have a chance to keep our global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. But boy, it would sure be good if we started now. So I’m both terrified and hopeful.