Welcome back to Climate+! This is Episode 4, featuring Emmanuel Daniel at Alosanar.

In this episode, we go deep into the built environment, looking at the ways that the Climate+ World is making the interaction of buildings, energy, water, artificial intelligence, and people quite different than it has ever been before.

Emmanuel Daniel has been a leader in this field for many, many years and all around the world. Emmanuel is currently the CEO and Founder of Alosanar, a consultancy focused on building technology and human experience design through technology, sustainability, experiences, and people. Prior to Alosanar, Emmanuel was a leader at Microsoft for 12 years, shaping physical and digital environments from his native Singapore to nearly every continent on earth.

Here's the challenge: We humans are creatures of our built environment – especially the home, office, commercial, and industrial buildings that keep us safe, comfortable, and productive.

Most of that building stock was built before the phrases “climate change” or “hybrid work” entered the lexicon. Just in the US, something like 80% of homes are more than 20 years old and the average ages of both commercial buildings and school buildings is about 50 years. Those older buildings were designed around a set of assumptions that were reasonable for their time – pre-climate change ambient temperatures, humidity, and pre-wildfire air quality, for example.

Little thought was given to energy efficiency or water efficiency, let alone greenhouse gases. (spoiler alert: buildings account for about 30% of operational GHG emissions in the US. And of course we were all in commute-to-office and work-from-office mode, not work-from-home or some hybrid. Finally, nobody foresaw our digital-everything world of computers, the Internet, server farms, electric vehicles, and now artificial intelligence.

That's a big of a deal, and one where purpose and prosperity comes in many forms (and jobs!). How can we make this happen in the real world?