Multidisciplinary research aims to ‘clean up’ the world’s tall buildings

The LOCAST (Low-Carbon Structures) project has received £1.2m in funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The team said that while tall buildings use urban space efficiently, constructing them has a high carbon cost compared to the same floor space spread across several shorter buildings.

“We’re at a point where heating and lighting are so efficient that most of the lifetime climate emissions from any new building come from making the concrete, steel and glass that go into it,” Professor Ian Walker, an environmental psychologist from Swansea University, who co-authored the funding bid, said in a statement.

“Using less of these materials in tall buildings would put a big dent in the emissions from the built environment. But to do this, we need to understand how making tall buildings more lightweight would affect the people inside them.”

According to the Swansea team, the reason engineers put so much material into tall buildings is not for safety, but so that their occupants won’t feel them sway in the wind.