Climate Rhetoric and Reality:
The Case of Halifax, Nova Scotia

Why Municipalities are at the Center of the Climate Crisis

There’s a persistent gap between climate rhetoric and reality concerning local governments approving horizontal and vertical sprawl at the expense of human-scale development. Many municipalities profess to take “climate action” yet they continue to mandate development patterns that maximize CO2 emissions. The vast majority of municipalities abide by the rule of perpetual urban sprawl, never taking the steps necessary to transition to human-scale development patterns, which lowers CO2 emissions relative to conventional suburban or high-rise development (i.e., horizontal or vertical sprawl).

Figures compiled by the UN and U.S. Energy Administration show that building operations and building material and construction account for 28% and 11% of global emissions. The net is that building construction and operation account for 39% of emissions.

Now consider transportation. Data compiled by the EPA defines “sectors” in the economy a bit differently, but what’s relevant is that in the U.S., the percentage of emissions for transportation is 38%. This figure is higher than the global value because Americans drive more by a considerable amount.

EPA data also shows that private vehicles produce 58% of transportation emissions. The percentage of emissions produced by private vehicles alone is therefore 22% (i.e., 58% of 38%).

In sum, building construction, building operations, and private vehicles account for roughly 61% of all emissions in the United States  (i.e., 39% from buildings, and 22% from transportation). This places municipalities at the epicenter of the climate crisis because these emissions tie directly or indirectly back to the most fundamental activity of local government, which is to decide what and where things get built. And the urban sprawl that municipalities routinely build—in their horizontal and vertical variations—maximizes CO2 emissions.

As the status quo prevails, 30 million tons of Greenland’s ice cap are melting every hour, altering salinity levels, and slowing a key ocean current responsible for distributing heat around the planet. If this current—called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC)—collapses as the scientific community increasingly predicts it will, life on Earth will be altered in ways that go well beyond the 2020-2021 pandemic.

Halifax, Nova Scotia—Never a Bastion of Good Governance

Given that over half of emissions relate directly to planning and development decisions made by local governments, a municipality that is serious about reducing emissions would pay great attention to what and where things get built. And if you’re a local government making bold claims regarding your steps to “combat global warming” you’d do well to have a credible implementation plan in place, which brings us back to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia is an Atlantic Canadian province that sits northeast of Maine, perched out in the Atlantic Ocean. Halifax, the provincial capital, has a metro population of about 350,000, with about 75,000 living in the city.

Some context is in order. Nova Scotia’s provincial government is in the early stages of using mass immigration to double the province’s population from 1 million to 2 million by 2060. The largest numbers are coming from India and China. It’s a crude form of economic development that supercharges real estate development. This is happening in a Canadian province with a long history of corruption that’s never gone away.

Similar policies are being pursued both at the federal level and in provinces across Canada, in keeping with the aims of a lobbying organization called Century Initiative that seeks to triple Canada’s population by 2100 for reasons some young Canadians consider cynical at best. Setting aside the broader implications for quality of life, little thought is given, for example, to the climate implications of aggressively recruiting people from India to move to Canada so they can increase their carbon footprint by a factor of five.

Another boon to real estate developers is the fact that Canada ranks near the bottom of all G20 nations in terms of its anti-money laundering enforcement. Each year, billions of dollars of dirty money get pumped into the Canadian real estate market, inflating prices, and reducing available housing stock. Per Canada’s Financial Post,

International money laundering watchdogs have condemned Canada’s failure to regulate its mortgage brokers, lenders, housing investment funds, realtors, developers and lawyers. 

Diane Francis, Financial Post

Suffice it to say, there are broader, external factors that directly and indirectly influence how Halifax operates. And even before these issues arose, few would have considered Nova Scotia a bastion of good governance.

Canada’s American Way of Life Makes it a Top CO2 Emitter

On January 29, 2019, the Halifax Regional Council declared a “climate emergency,” emphasizing that climate change is an urgent threat.[i] They subsequently adopted a climate action plan called 2050, which commits the municipality to be carbon neutral by 2050. Council then increased property taxes by 3% to pay for its implementation.

If you look at the chart below, you’ll see that both the U.S. and Canada are outliers in terms of per capita C02 production.

Canada’s emissions track with the United States for good reason. The vast majority of Canadians (i.e., those not living in cities that are increasingly both unaffordable and overdeveloped) lead a lifestyle conceived of and defined in the U.S.A.

It was an American who invented single-use zoning in 1915. Another group of Americans created a template for auto-dependency in the late 1920s. Yet another group of Americans established regulations that codified this template and mandated its use starting in the 1930s. And Americans on Wall Street defined standard real estate product types used to efficiently finance and propagate urban sprawl. Canadians have embraced all these American ideas and they have the CO2 emissions to show for it.

One example illustrates the point. Below, on the left, you see the cover page for an American publication titled Subdivision Standards. For our purposes, we need to understand just two things about this publication. First is that it was the downstream product of a piece of legislation called the National Housing Act, enacted into law in 1934. And second, this publication was instrumental in effectively mandating suburban development across the country for decades.

The Canadian government was sufficiently impressed by the ideas behind the National Housing Act that they passed comparable legislation called the Dominion Housing Act the following year. As illustrated by the Cape Cod house below on the right, even as early as 1935, Canadians were embracing American ideas regarding a world in which auto-dependency and maximizing CO2 production was the norm.

Cross the border into Canada today and you see the same strip malls, hotel chains, and big box stores laid out in similar fashion. When working as an urban planner with the Halifax Regional Municipality, I experienced an uncannily similar routine as in the United States. In both countries, I’d attend weekly development review meetings in which planners sat around a long table reviewing proposals for yet more urban sprawl submitted by developers. In none of these staff meetings did anyone suggest that they were operating as little more than cogs in a sprawl machine that bore significant social, economic, and environmental consequences.

There’s good reason why Nova Scotia’s emission figures track with the U.S., with well over half of emissions relating to private vehicles, building construction, and building operation. And again, if you’re a municipal government using taxpayer dollars to travel overseas to tell people at international climate conferences what a great job you’re doing, there would, ideally, be little daylight between rhetoric and reality.

Yet, in Halifax, politicians and planners have established a regulatory environment that consistently produces development that maximizes rather than reduces CO2 emissions. Neither their policies nor regulations bear any resemblance to best practices established elsewhere. Rather than produce human-scale development of a sort that produces less CO2 (during both building construction and operation) and generates high walk scores, Halifax has opted to do the opposite with policies that:

1. Mandate auto-dependency over a 2800 square-mile area.
2. Incentivize demolition over renovation to satisfy influential developers.
3. Promote high-rise development over human-scale development.

Each of these policies produces worse-case climate outcomes, making Halifax a leading emitter of CO2 among all municipalities around the globe. These policies work directly against providing residents with a high quality of life.

Mandating Auto-Dependency Over a 2800 Square-Mile Area

The Halifax Regional Municipality is twice the size of Rhode Island and covers 2809 square miles. Aside from about nine square miles of traditional urban development patterns, the remaining 2800 square miles are shaped by zoning ordinances that mandate auto-dependency.

Given that Nova Scotia’s transportation sector accounts for 30% of all emissions, you might expect auto-dependency to be a principal focus of any discussion. Yet, the Halifax Regional Municipality’s 54-page plan, HalifACT—Acting on Climate Together, contains only one vague reference to land use planning, which reads, “Integrate climate into land use planning policies and processes.”

In none of the public meetings, council meetings, or promotional videos relating to HalifACT did the subject of auto-dependent development even come up. HalifACT’s initial $10M budget focused on activities such as building retrofits, electric vehicles for municipal employees and purchasing an “electric ice resurfacer” for a hockey rink.

Electric ice resurfacers (i.e., Zambonis) have not been a focus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC has, however, called attention to the relationship between urban sprawl and a rapidly warming planet. And they’re hardly alone, as evidenced by the dozen articles below.

1. We can’t beat the climate crisis without rethinking land use (Brookings Institution)
2. Rethinking Urban Sprawl (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
3. Suburbs are a climate disaster, but they can be redeemed (Nature)
4. How can we reduce the climate footprint of the suburbs? (MIT)
5. Latest IPCC Report Highlights How ‘Smarter’ Cities Can Mitigate Climate Change (Yale University)
6. Discourage urban sprawl (David Suzuki Foundation)
7. Addressing Transportation and Inflation is a Climate Solution (America Walks)
8. Climate change focus moves to the suburbs as cities continue to sprawl (Canadian Broadcasting Corp)
9. Why Sprawl Could Be The Next Big Climate Change Battle (National Public Radio)
10. Can The Suburbs Help Fight Against Climate Change? (The Sprawl)
11. This map shows how low-density sprawl makes climate change worse (The Greater Greater Washington)
12. Suburban sprawl cancels carbon-footprint savings of dense urban cores (Berkeley News)

Despite the connection between auto-dependency and global warming being obvious and widely discussed, Halifax’s climate action plan (which involves many people and institutions) does not broach the subject, much less seek out and adopt best practices that fundamentally change development patterns.

For the purposes of urban planning and real estate development, the Halifax Regional Municipality is split into 21 different “plan areas.” Each area has its own land-use plan and land-use regulations, and all are, in practice, worst-case scenarios for a rapidly warming planet.

In contrast to a place like Gaithersburg, Maryland, the municipality has never had the political leadership and professional talent required to do anything other than propagate 70-year-old American ideas rooted in auto-dependency. As a result, the regulatory framework shaping land development is a bureaucratic morass of hundreds of pages similar to what appears below devoted to the task of ensuring an automobile is required for most human activities.

The net result is that as Atlantic Ocean circulation nears a devastating tipping point, Halifax’s urban planners routinely work with politicians and developers to expand the reach of auto dependency.

Many Nova Scotians would tell you (if asked) that their values differ from Americans on the far right who claim anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. However, Nova Scotia’s public sector produces an environmental outcome that is objectively worse than what you’d find in many conservative American jurisdictions.

Below are photos of 25 recently completed homes produced by the aforementioned land use laws. Looking at the associated walk scores, you’ll see that each house scores abysmally low. A larger sample of 50 recently constructed houses in the Halifax Regional Municipality produced an average walk score of 8.5 (out of a possible score of 100).

As of this writing, Halifax is in the early stages of planning to create what they term “complete communities” on a few parcels in suburban locales. The site plans are poorly designed and lack fundamental urban design characteristics common to projects completed in Rockville, MD, Dublin, OH, and Gaithersburg, MD. The Halifax projects sit in “special planning areas” which are locations designated by the province in which development is fast-tracked in response to the housing crisis brought on by government-engineered mass immigration at both the federal and provincial levels.

There’s a negligent quality to Halifax’s climate action plan, as it does not discuss the pressing need for regulatory reform leading to the production of human-scale development. Such reform is not theoretical. For example, Gaithersburg did it and over the past 30 years, they’ve consistently built places that produce walk scores in the “very walkable” range of 70-89.

Incentivizing Demolitions over Renovation to Satisfy Developers

The second gap between climate rhetoric and reality is the widespread practice in Halifax of demolishing existing buildings as part of a broader agenda that features a tactic called “upzoning” to maximize developer profit at the expense of the community.

In recent years, the municipality has changed zoning regulations to allow developers to purchase and consolidate narrow lots containing attractive, viable, well-built, century-old buildings. Developers destroy the buildings and erect much larger, taller buildings made of concrete and steel. The scale of destruction and the environmental costs are significant, yet Halifax’s climate action plan is silent on the issue.

Note: Concrete construction is environmentally damaging for several reasons, including the need for massive amounts of riparian sand (wrecking aquatic ecosystems), and the high levels of CO2 emissions during cement production. During cement production (i.e., concrete’s binding agent) limestone (CaCO3) is heated to a high temperature to produce a material called quicklime (CaO), and CO2 is released as a byproduct. (i.e., CaCO3​→CaO+CO2)

Like auto-dependency, the consequences of demolishing existing buildings are well understood and covered extensively. Following is another selection of a dozen articles from both sides of the Atlantic.

1. The construction industry remains horribly climate-unfriendly (The Economist)
2. Building renovation: where circular economy and climate meet (European Environment Agency)
3. The Reuse Imperative (National Trust for Historic Preservation)
4. Addressing climate change by retrofitting Canada’s existing buildings (Policy Options)
5. Building Reuse: A Proven Climate and Economic Strategy (American Institute of Architects)
6. The case for … never demolishing another building (The Guardian)
7. Climate Change: MPs say building demolitions must be reduced (BBC)
8. Save a building, fight climate change (Canadian Broadcasting Corp)
9. It’s All Connected: Deconstruction, Reuse, and Climate Change (The Erie Reader)
10. Think Twice Before Demolishing (Norwegian Green Building Council)
11. To create net-zero cities, we need to look hard at our older buildings (World Economic Forum)
12. Rebuild or Renovate: The Carbon Conundrum (Financial Times)

Behind these articles are intergovernmental organizations pressing to recognize the construction industry’s impact on both the climate and the planet. The International Energy Organization (IEA) provides policy recommendations, analysis, and data on the global energy sector. Aware that humanity is quickly running out of time, they put forward six major policy recommendations relating to the construction industry, one of which calls for incentivizing the refurbishing and renovation of buildings over demolition.

In keeping with the IEA’s recommendation, the European Commission has funded a program called Renovation Wave whose principal objective is to preserve existing building stock to achieve urgently needed emission reductions. The European Commission has said the following regarding ending building demolition.

Europe aims to be the first climate neutral continent in the world. To achieve this ambitious goal and align all agents within the EU, the European Green Deal aims to overcome the challenges of climate change and guide the continent towards carbon-zero by 2050, while creating economic growth.

One of the key actions identified by the European Green Deal is the need to renovate the existing building stock. The building sector is one of the largest energy consumers, accounting for 40% of the EU’s total energy consumption and over one third of total energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. To date, however, the pace of deep renovation across Europe is lagging. This is not only a threat to the achievement of climate targets, but also impacts the far-reaching social, economic and environmental benefits that could be brought by renovation at scale, creating jobs and improving lives of communities across the EU.

European Commission

In 2019, the UK’s leading architecture magazine started a movement called RetroFirst, which has since garnered the support of over 200 architecture firms. Although RetroFirst does not yet have the equivalent backing of the European Commission, committees in the UK House of Commons have held hearings on the movement, and increasing numbers of elected officials are calling for the end to the wasteful, climate-ravaging cycle of demolition and rebuilding. The video below introduces the climate implications of demolition.

This information is not new. In 2010, London School of Economics professor emeritus Anne Power wrote a paper published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineering titled, “Housing and sustainability: demolition or refurbishment?” Power was principally critiquing the UK government’s 2003 “sustainable communities plan” which called for widespread demolition that was costly, deeply unpopular, and anything but sustainable. Concluding Power writes,

Large-scale and accelerated demolition would neither help with meeting energy and climate change targets, nor would it address social needs. Refurbishment offers clear advantages in time, cost, community impact, prevention of building sprawl, reuse of existing infrastructure and protection of existing communities. It can also lead to significantly reduced energy use in buildings in both the short and long term.

Ann Power, London School of Economics

Unfortunately, the Halifax Regional Municipality is executing a similar plan that is rapidly destroying well-built, generally well-maintained, historic housing stock and other commercial buildings throughout the city.

This “densification” process is occurring in a city that already had, as of 2016, a population density twice that of Burlington, VT, and almost three times that of Portland, ME. In fact, before “densification”, Halifax already had almost three-quarters of the density found in Philadelphia, which begs the question: what problem exactly were Halifax’s politicians and bureaucrats trying to solve?

In 2013, the municipality hired a consulting firm to produce a report quantifying the costs and benefits of different “regional growth scenarios.” That report recommended that the municipality slow suburban growth and “intensify” development in the city to save on infrastructure costs. The report says little about climate change, and nothing about the policy, regulatory, and procedural changes required to stop building auto-dependent development and start building human-scale development.

A throwback from another era, the report incorrectly assumes the municipality must continue to produce suburban sprawl but recommends doing so at a slower rate. To slow the rate down, the report’s authors recommend that an arbitrary target of 40% of new development occur inside established city boundaries. The report speaks of the “aspirations for intensification that reach beyond the metrics established in the regional plan to create an even more intensively concentrated region.” 

This bureaucratic language relates to the aforementioned practice of providing giveaways to influential developers in the form of upzoning so they can destroy century-old buildings, combine multiple parcels into one, and construct significantly larger buildings made of concrete, glass, and steel. In short, it’s a recipe for propagating a climate disaster and erasing a cultural heritage of a sort that makes a city a compelling place to live.

Below, a bulldozer destroys a century-old duplex two blocks from the house where we raised our children. This demolished building had been renovated four years earlier, and it sat next to a home built in 1841 that you can see in the background. Residents that I’ve spoken to along this street find it psychologically challenging to consider their house to be a place to call home as developers with questionable ethics demolish in keeping with municipal plans for further “densification.”

A former classmate from planning school who now leads some of these efforts in the municipality told me they’re “quite confident” they can accommodate even higher levels of growth in the city, which is to imply that destroying the historic city and building even taller is an optimal outcome.

The mindset reflected in the report, among planning staff and on the municipal council is objectively tragic, producing the worst possible outcomes for CO2 emissions, affordable housing, aesthetics, culture, and community well-being.

This densification policy was built upon the work of a Harvard Design School graduate from Nova Scotia named Andy Fillmore. Fillmore later became a politician, but twenty years ago, he led a planning effort called Halifax by Design. This “master plan” laid the groundwork for the widespread use of upzoning, and the destruction of Halifax’s late 19^th and early 20^th-century human-scale architecture. Back in 2008, journalist Chris Benjamin questioned Fillmore about the wisdom of Fillmore’s dense, high-rise future for Halifax. In response, Fillmore said, “We have to focus on getting people out of their cars, and that involves tall buildings.”

After Fillmore left the planning field to join a Trudeau government committed to mass immigration, Halifax unveiled a new master plan called the “Center Plan“, accelerating the process of demolition and densification throughout the city. In parallel, the municipality pressed on with auto-dependent development outside the pre-1945 city boundaries, producing the low walk scores I previously noted.

Below are the demolition permits that were active between January 2020 and December 2022. They are part of a larger group of over 2500 demolition permits that the municipality issued in the city since 2003, the equivalent of about 17 city blocks.

Demolitions in an era of government-engineered mass immigration have only exacerbated the affordable housing crisis further, alienating Nova Scotians in the process. In some locations, land will sit vacant for years as developers wait out people who refuse to sell adjacent parcels eligible for lot consolidation. As this continued to play out in 2023, Nova Scotia experienced the largest increase in housing prices in Canada that year. The country, in turn, had the least affordable housing among all G7 nations.

Below is a selection of vacant lots produced by recent demolitions, demolitions in progress, and older buildings the municipality considers eligible for destruction. I’ve also included photos of our house when we were renovating it in 2008 to illustrate that renovations are a viable alternative to demolition.

This destruction is the result of my former planning colleagues having identified high-intensity “corridors” throughout the city where parcels (properties) will be combined so that larger buildings can replace historic structures.

I live one block from one of these corridors. Per Halifax’s master plan, over 40 century-old homes on the edge of my neighborhood either have been or will be destroyed, as developers methodically purchase properties and evict people.[xi] In this same corridor, developers will destroy another 93 century-old structures, all of which are in reasonable to good condition.

The municipal zoning map below shows these new “corridors” in violet. New high-rise “centers” appear in red. As shown on the previous map above, the practice of demolishing viable historic structures goes well beyond these colored zones.

As a point of reference, the red zone outlined in yellow is the location of the four 40-story towers to be built two blocks from our house and is a subject I’ll return to shortly. The brown zones represent high-rise development that the city either has or will pursue in the near term. Taken together, the map provides a sense of the scale of destruction.

When my wife and I moved to Halifax in 2000, most of the city was still built at the human scale and it still bore some resemblance to Bergen, Norway, one of my favorite European cities. Halifax’s future is more in keeping with Dubai or Shanghai.

What’s striking is that the Halifax Regional Municipality is pursuing its demolition agenda in spite of the fact that even a mainstream organization such as the World Economic Forum understands this is the wrong way to proceed.

Urgent action is needed in cities if countries are to meet their net zero targets. However, the established model of demolishing existing structures and rebuilding is hard to justify; new construction brings its own issues of embodied carbon, material shortages and global supply chain pressures.

World Economic Forum

And all the while, hundreds of people involved in Halifax’s climate action plan, including Dalhousie University’s College of Sustainability and School of Planning (where I studied) have failed to even discuss much less criticize the very core of what Halifax has embarked upon. This collective silence is deeply disturbing given everything climate science is telling us.

Promoting high-rise development over human-scale development

Halifax’s implicit rejection of the human scale and embrace of high-rise development is the third gap between climate rhetoric and reality. Like urban sprawl and building demolition, the climate implications of high-rise development are well understood. Their construction and operation produce worst-case outcomes in a world in which, again, 31% of global emissions tie back to these activities. Halifax’s climate action plan is silent on this subject even as it promotes tax-dollar-funded videos focused on upcycling paper bags and net zero brewing.

Two blocks from our home, developers will soon erect four 40-story towers where there are currently 24 historic mixed-use buildings, including the oldest apartment building in the city. These towers will sit across from two-story, 120-year-old homes which serve to emphasize the absurdity of the situation.

This is the future that Halifax’s former Manager of Urban Design, Andy Fillmore, laid out in lockstep with influential developers, municipal leaders, and senior bureaucrats working behind the scenes. The illustration below shows what the development looks like at 30 stories. It was made before municipal council approved another 10 stories in height. The development will violate the most basic principles of human-scale design in terms of height, massing, scale, and compatibility. The development regulations they put in place to implement their ideas maximize the production of CO2 emissions.

There’s a false belief among some that taller buildings are more energy efficient, but engineers and scientists have known for several years this is not true. Studies have consistently found that high-rise buildings require more energy to build and operate than their human-scale counterparts.

No evidence exists that suggests the net-zero future that optimists speak of is just around the corner regarding mainstream building practices involving high-rise construction. And the hype surrounding the widespread use of reinforced timber for high rises does not stand up to scrutiny. Those actually involved with these kinds of projects state emphatically that building towers with timber “does not make sense.”

Additionally, researchers have determined that, when factoring in real-world policies, regulations, and structural considerations, building at the human scale (2-6 stories) provides for the most efficient use of land. Simply put, building “tall” does not produce maximum densities across a city that purports to offer its citizens a high quality of life, much less do well by the climate.

Following is a selection of prominent, directly relevant studies that Halifax’s climate action plan has never addressed in their public meetings, literature, or upbeat videos featuring young Haligonians who care about the climate. Although the municipality speaks of “net zero buildings,” the ambiguity with which the subject is addressed reflects the fact that municipal leaders routinely engage in greenwashing.

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Nature and Science are the two most prominent peer-reviewed science journals in the world. A team of researchers in Scotland’s Edinburgh Napier University completed a study published in Nature that dispels the belief that building tall is the best way to accommodate a growing urban population. Seeking to avoid the bias associated with any one specific location, the team produced 5000 simulated urban environments using real-world data drawn from European cities.

Below are four urban typologies analyzed: a) High Density/High-Rise, b) Low Density/High Rise, c) High-Density/Low-Rise, and d) Low-Density/Low-Rise.

The study presents two important conclusions. First, High-Density/High-Rise (Figure a) development significantly increases Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas emissions in a way that High-Density/Low-Rise (Figure b) does not. Second, High-Density/Low-Rise urban topologies use land more efficiently. The authors state, “The results of this study suggest that there is no merit to the claim that building denser and taller is more sustainable. By building dense, low-rise urban environments, the same populations can be accommodated for drastically lower carbon costs and without having to significantly increase land use.”

Research Team:

• Francesco Pomponi—PhD, Life Cycle Assessment
• Jay Arehart—PhD, Architectural Engineering
• Ruth Saint—PhD, Engineering and the Built Environment
• Bernardino D’Amico—PhD, Timber Engineering, Computation and Structural Design
• Niaz Gharavi—PhD, Structural Engineering

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When complete, the Jeddah Tower will be the tallest building in the world, standing over 1 Km tall. You’d not expect the firm that designed that “supertall” to produce a report definitively showing that high-rise buildings consume more energy and emit more CO2 relative to human-scale development, but that’s precisely the case.

In 2015, the Chicago-based architecture firm, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, compared the environmental performance of different building typologies ranging from 2015 story “supertalls” to single-family houses. The research team designed a simulation model composed of building typologies that complied with Chicago’s building codes and community prototypes defined by data drawn from GIS systems maintained by Chicago and Naperville, Illinois. They created energy models using Design Builder and run in Energy Plus, both of which are industry standards for profiling energy demand. The team calculated emission figures using data from the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute, the University of Bath Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE), and the Concrete Pipeline Systems Association.

As shown below, researchers determined that building at the human scale consumed the least amount of operational energy and produced the fewest emissions. Importantly, the results below do not include embodied carbon, which would further exacerbate the difference between building tall and building at the human scale.

Researchers found that high rises (16-story, 34-story, 58-story) have higher operational energy requirements (hence higher CO2 emissions) for several reasons, including:

1. Added loads of water pumps (i.e., water needs to be pumped to higher elevations, thus more energy is consumed).
2. Added loads for elevators.
3. Higher loads for cooling, fans, and plug loads.
4. Architecturally, higher glazing ratios perform poorly compared to high-mass envelopes relative to human-scale buildings. Reasons include higher infiltration rates in upper stories, heat loss in winter, and unwanted heat gain in summer.
5. Elevators, which account for 10% of total energy consumption for supertalls (i.e., taller than 300 meters) and 4-6% for other high rises.
6. Tall buildings depend on a series of spaces that are not residential units but account for 30% of the total building area. Among these are the mechanical floors, the lobbies and amenities, and parking garages. These spaces are continually illuminated and air-conditioned (or heated) yet are infrequently occupied.

Research Team:

• Katrina Fernandez—MSc, Environmental Building Design
• Christopher Drew – PhD, Desert Ecology
• Keara Fanning—MSc, Bioenergy

Additional support from the University of Bath:

• Stephen Allen—PhD, Mechanical Engineering (Thermodynamic and Life Cycle Carbon Analysis of Energy Supply for Buildings)
• Craig Jones – PhD, Mechanical Engineering (Thermodynamic and Life Cycle Carbon Analysis of Energy Supply for Buildings)

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University College London (UCL) is the #1 rated school in the world for architecture and the built environment. Between 2015 and 2017, UCL researchers set out to determine whether high-rise buildings are more energy-intensive than low-rise buildings and found conclusively that the answer was yes. They determined that energy could be saved (and emissions reduced) by building low-rise buildings instead of skyscrapers.

Their activities include compiling data on over 600 office buildings and all residential buildings in twelve London boroughs. They found that high-rise office buildings having 20 or more stories consumed almost twice the electricity use per square meter was almost two and a half times greater than buildings constructed at the human scale (i.e., 2 to 6 stories in height). Additionally, they determined that gas use also increases with height, by around 40%. As a result, total carbon emissions from gas and electricity from high-rise buildings are twice as high as in low-rise.

Research Team:

• Philip Steadman—MArch, Emeritus Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies, Energy Institute, Bartlett School of Energy, Environment, and Resources, University College London
• Ian Hamilton—PhD, Energy and the Built Environment
• Homeira Shayesteh—PhD, Architectural and Urban Studies
• Stephen Evans—MSc, GIS & Land Information Management and Mapping
• Graciela Moreno—MArch, Urban Design
• Michael Donn—PhD, Building Sciences
• Daniel Godoy-Shimizu—MArch

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BC Hydro is the public utility that provides electricity to residents of Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2019, BC Hydro completed a study that further dispelled the myth that cities grow greener as they grow taller.

For well over a decade, Vancouver has been hailed as a “climate leader” as that city filled the sky with high rises paid for by “billions in dirty Chinese cash.” When BC Hydro, however, examined energy usage throughout the city, they drew a conclusion suggesting the city’s reputation as a climate leader is misplaced. It turns out that many of the supposedly energy-efficient (i.e., LEED) high rises they’ve been erecting consume significantly more energy than older buildings.

BC Hydro examined energy use across the city and found “electricity used per square foot nearly doubling since for new buildings in comparison to those built in the 1980s.” Their study notes that,

Despite many new, high-end condo buildings being marketed as being energy-efficient, British Columbians living in them have a much larger energy footprint than those living in older condos and apartments–regardless of what they may think.

BC Hydro

The report notes that despite the units in “newer high-rise buildings often being marketed as energy-efficient and including things like LED lighting and ENERGY STAR® appliances, the combined electricity usage of the overall building is approximately two times more than high-rises built in the 1980s. They also use almost four times more electricity than low-rise buildings built that same decade.”

As shown below, the most dramatic increase in the change of energy usage occurred between 1999 and 2009, and levels have remained elevated since.

Recall that the research team at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill (i.e., Jeddah Tower designers) noted that about 30% of buildings were given over to spaces such as mechanical floors, parking garages, and lobbies, all of which require heating, cooling, and lighting. BC Hydro has stated that much of the increase in energy consumption in newer high rises is related to these kinds of spaces, which additionally included sporadically used pools, workspaces, hot tubs, party rooms, and fitness centers.

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In Halifax, it’s not difficult to find evidence of Halifax’s policies and regulations promoting high-rise development over the human scale. Below is a selection of building sites on which high-rise development is planned, is in progress, or has been recently completed. And again, all of this (and more) is happening in a relatively small city (i.e., less than 7 square miles with 75,000 people) that already had triple the population density of Portland, ME, twice the density of Burlington, VT, and three quarters the density of Philadelphia.

Mass Immigration and the Implications for Climate Change

Canadians have been told by both their provincial and federal governments that mass immigration is the only appropriate response to an aging population. As mentioned, the goal is to triple the population by end of century. Yet, Canada is aging more slowly than many countries such as Sweden, Germany, France, and the UK. And none of these other countries are clamoring for dramatic population increases of the sort some Canadians seem to accept irrespective of glaring lapses in coherence.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) maintains what’s called an old age dependency ratio for member countries and a few non-member countries like China. This ratio is simply the number of people age 65 and older for every 100 persons age 64 and below. The chart below shows the projected dependency ratios for selected countries in 2075. Figures for Canada were compiled in 2020 before mass immigration policies took full effect, and as shown in the figure below, Canada’s dependency ratio falls below the OECD average, meaning its population is younger than that of many other countries. The actual reason for mass immigration lies elsewhere.

Canadian politicians have adopted what Better Dwelling co-founder Stephen Punwasi describes as “predatory population growth strategies” to fuel the country’s real estate frenzy. An analysis of Canadian housing completed by the OECD notes that the amount of money being spent building housing as a percentage of GDP is almost double the OECD average (i.e., 8.9% versus 4.8%). So in this sense, mass immigration is working as intended regardless of a myriad of problems, including elevated emissions, the absence of human-scale design, and housing affordability.

Economist David Williams, with the Business Council of British Columbia, refers to “record levels of immigration levels to turbocharge population growth and housing demand” as one of “four shaky pillars” the federal government relies on to fuel economic growth. He also notes that the OECD predicts Canada will be the worst-performing advanced economy over the next decade and beyond. Flooding one’s country with hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year may not be an optimal economic development strategy, but it is the one Canadian policymakers have doubled down on.

This is the context in which Halifax’s real estate development policies operate. And it’s a context that the Dalhousie/HalifACT conference failed to discuss because Indigenous spirituality and meditation were understood to be more relevant to identifying solutions to make progress against meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions.

There’s no evidence that Halifax—or any other Canadian municipality, for that matter—is poised to make the “transformational change” required to significantly reduce its emissions.

Despite proclamations in Halifax regarding a net-zero high-rise future, the research shows that achieving net-zero becomes increasingly difficult as building height increases. A range of studies indicate that most net-zero buildings today are constructed at the human scale.

Similarly, my former planning colleagues and HalifACT staff speak optimistically of an EV future, yet these vehicles exact their own destructive environmental and social costs. Aside from the embodied carbon related to vehicle production, there are a whole slew of minerals that is mined to produce the batteries. For example, each battery requires approximately 30 pounds of cobalt, and for the Congo—where 70% of cobalt is obtained—that is a major problem. Below the University of Bath explains why.

Looking ahead, there is no evidence that Canada’s Halifax Regional Municipality will be taking its foot off the accelerator, and making the transformational changes necessary to significantly reduce its emissions.

Cultural context is everything here. Along with resource extraction (e.g., the Alberta tar sands, clearcutting forests, open pit coal mines, etc.), mass immigration and real estate development are three legs of a rudimentary economic program sold under the banner which says bigger is always better.

It’s understood that population growth and climate change are linked. Figures compiled by the World Resources Institute show that the world’s top 10 emitters produce over two-thirds of global emissions. Adding significantly more people to a top-emitting country has disproportionately negative consequences. Canada is one of those top ten emitters, and it is going to climb up the emission rankings as its politicians close in on their goal of tripling a 2016 population of 36 million to over 100 million by end of century.

The average population growth rate across all Western European countries in 2023 was 0.32%. That same year, the rate in the U.S. was 0.5%. Canada’s population increased by 3.2%, putting it in the company of developing countries with high population growth rates like the Congo, Uganda, and Angola. The Canadian government is planning to continue to bring in a half million people every year going forward (i.e., 1.25% per year).

In contrast Sweden has a quarter of Canada’s population and a projected growth rate that ranges between 0.25% and 0.59% when not contending with a migrant crisis. Notably, it’s able to produce advanced fighters, automobiles, electronics, and more.

Canada has economic productivity issues that will not be solved by tripling its population. Per capita spending on research and development is perhaps the biggest issue. As shown below, Canadian investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP lags well behind most industrialized nations.

Economic journalist David Parkinson has written that the “remarkable apathy toward R&D is a symptom of a broader lack of interest in productivity-enhancing investments.” It is a problem stretching back decades and has long been understood to lower per capita GDP, a measurement more relevant to individuals than the overall size of the economy.

The Bank of Canada, academia, public policy think tanks, commercial banks, and journalists have all raised concern regarding the lack of Canadian investment in R&D. And as R&D dollars fail to materialize, per capita GDP continues to decline, as happened again in 2023. This has a significant effect on living standards, as illustrated below. Tripling the population does not solve this problem, but it does increase emissions.

Many countries fall victim to their own propaganda, and no louder message rings in Canadian ears than the one that sings out, “Canada’s multiculturalism is our identity.” Elements of the Canadian press in Halifax have effectively used this message to sell the vision of a 100-million-person Canada with headlines like, “Halifax, becoming boom town as it welcomes population, economic growth.” Another reads, “As more Chinese newcomers call Halifax home, a Chinatown starts to take shape.” Still another reads, “Why Chinese house hunters are increasingly drawn to Halifax.”

More recently, the Canadian press has presented the Nova Scotia government’s plans to double the population in a largely uncritical light with headlines such as “Nova Scotia looks to double population to 2 million by 2060” and “N.S. premier says benefits of population boom outweigh challenges.” Ignoring the climate implications, Canadian news reporters produce formulaic articles that repeat government talking points regarding rapid population growth. Headlines convey the government’s plans in a positive light. The articles themselves dutifully mention a critic, but a majority of content is given over to quotes from government officials and their allies in Nova Scotia’s sizable immigration service sector.

Statements made by proponents of mass immigration require the reader to suspend disbelief. Jennifer Watt, former municipal councilor turned CEO of the Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia, is on record as saying, “The answer to the housing crisis and the healthcare access issues that we have in Nova Scotia, is in a large part [sic] through immigration.” Ava Czapalay, the individual running Nova Scotia’s Office of Immigration and Population Growth, confidently looks to the future as she states, “We’re on track for a record-breaking year, after a record-breaking year.” Their views are representative of many who claim that problems exacerbated by rapid population growth will be solved by more of the same.

Harvard-trained economist Don Wright has dissected these kinds of statements and found them to be rife with shortcomings. Wright, who led British Columbia’s civil service between 2017 and 2020, had the following to say about using immigration to address healthcare staffing issues.

A story is spun is that the government will use the higher immigration numbers to bring in more health care professionals.  But this would only work if the proportion of qualified doctors, nurses and allied health workers in the more than one million new Canadians is significantly larger than the existing proportion of those professionals in the current Canadian population, and that they could get licensed immediately to practice in Canada.  Neither of these conditions will be met. 

Don Wright, Head of Public Service, British Columbia (2017-2020)

There is a Kafkaesque quality to what is happening in Nova Scotia and across Canada. If you follow the money, however, it makes sense. Mindful of the relationship between rapid population growth and real estate, it’s relevant to ask who benefits. And Vancouver Sun journalist Douglas Todd has written, “In the midst of an affordability crisis that has struck Canada harder than almost any other country, the public should be worried that an unusually high proportion of its politicians are landlords.

It turns out that Canada’s federal and provincial politicians are generating income from real estate at a rate that is more than double the rate of the general population. It follows then that a landlord class holding the levers of political power benefits financially as property prices and rental rates soar in response to increased demand brought on by mass immigration.

Closing the Gap Between Climate Rhetoric and Reality

In late 2022 and early 2023, Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning partnered with HalifACT to hold four sessions on climate change that were open to the public. The stated purpose of the series was to “design the path toward climate action.”

The Dean of the faculty, Graham Gagnon, opened the first session, which focused on indigenous values. A few weeks later, the next session included a segment led by a “dean of mindfulness” from a local Buddhist school. It wasn’t until the third session that speakers focused on the built environment in the context of describing retrofitting a small percentage of the region’s residences and building “net-zero” houses in suburbia.

In that same session, a professor spoke about embodied carbon and the potential for using a material called biochar to sequester carbon in cement. His 10-minute presentation was the closest anybody came—during 6 hours and 24 minutes of talking over four sessions—to addressing any of the four key problems described in this article.

The most insightful words came in the last session. Shannon Miedema, who runs HalifACT, dutifully presented a positive, politically acceptable characterization of HalifACT’s accomplishments, and said, “From a city perspective, we can lead from where we are. We’ve got a great plan. We love that people are paying attention to it. We are actually gaining momentum, which is really really exciting. We’re getting more buy-in.”

But then she pivoted and said, “But we’re stuck in a lot of ways.” Noting that the municipality is well behind meeting their targets, she spoke candidly about the difficulties in bringing about the “transformational change” required to reduce emissions. Acknowledging that she and her staff “don’t hold a lot of power” she then said, “We really need those people in power to play with us, and I’m looking for good ideas on ways to move that forward.“

The thing is, Miedema is operating in the context of a body politic that will make it difficult for her to succeed. Cultural dishonesty and willful ignorance limit what’s possible to achieve. These conditions exist across Canada. But what makes Halifax notable is the degree to which political leadership, from the mayor on down, makes bold claims about their successes when in fact they produce worse-case outcomes in terms of emissions.

The fundamental problem in Halifax is how politicians, developers, and urban planners approach urban planning and development. In Halifax, they speak of the planning process in terms of growth management. In municipalities such as Dublin, OH, Gaithersburg, MD, and Tigard, OR, they speak of planning in terms of community character, quality of life, historic preservation, and meaningful public participation.

Quality of life is inextricably linked to mitigating CO2 emissions. It entails building at the human scale, which is to say 2 to 6 stories in height, and involves embracing best practices that provide the public with an exceptional pedestrian experience when they walk out their front door.

Early twentieth-century city builders in Halifax, Nova Scotia, produced what is essentially a master class in building compact, human-scale urban spaces, but the vision and talents that produced the neighborhood we raised our children have long since disappeared from the region.

Yet in the present day, there are a handful of municipalities like Gaithersburg, that have realized the four achievements required to consistently build at the human scale and produce high walk scores. In contrast to horizontal and vertical sprawl produced by Halifax, Gaithersburg has delivered on human-scale projects such as Crown Downtown, Kentlands, Lakelands, Spectrum, and Watkins Mill Town Center (which is still under construction).

Rhetoric and reality bear no resemblance to one another in Halifax, Nova Scotia. All of us who are concerned about the direction we’re heading have a vested interest in seeing municipalities credibly reduce the 61% of emissions that tie back to municipal decisions regarding what and where things get built. Look to Halifax to learn what not to do. If you want credible solutions that municipalities can refine further and improve upon, then look elsewhere.