Sustainability in Human Settlements: Imminent Material and Energy Challenges for Buildings in India

Abstract

Sustainability in the living environment requires a paradigm transition to environmentally conducive habitats based on judicious energy and resource use to foster a community that is happy, harmonious, healthy and productive. Habitats, or the living environment, comprise the built- and the natural environment. The built-environment is responsible for the single largest share of resource and energy consumption and demand. This paper provides an overview of sustainability in the context of human settlements with a focus on imminent material resources and energy challenges for buildings in India. Basic arguments on sustainability and well-being in human settlements, and the role of community attitude and behaviour have been highlighted. The paper discusses imminent impacts attributed to unbridled dependence on mined material resources, emissions and pollution due to energy expenditure in buildings, and particularly draws attention to implications of unperceived modernizing rural transitions.

Rural habitations, in India have thus far lived off the land with negligible demands on energy and process-intensive materials for sustenance. With a booming economy, increased affordability and exposure to urban lifestyles, the aspirations of rural habitations is now akin to middle-income urbanites. As rural habitations respond to the modernising aspirations of its inhabitants, an unrecognized but steady transition is evident from traditional local-materials based buildings to non-local high-process material based dwellings, viz., zero-energy to high-energy. The consequence is an unperceived but significant resource and energy footprint, that requires to be carefully discerned and regulated for sustainability. Key avenues for promoting sustainability in the built environment include effecting minimum alteration to (exhaustible) natural material, recycling non-organic solid waste into building products, adopting renewable construction materials and regulating energy and emissions in buildings.