VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

The building industry is one of the main contributors to climate change, in Europe alone it corresponds to 36% of greenhouse gas emissions (Eurostat, 2017). To tackle this, the EU has been developing policies and tools to achieve the European Green Deal objectives, including the EU Taxonomy classification system that aims to support developers, investors and policymakers to build green. However, green buildings have been criticised by scholars who explored the relationship between them and green and ecological gentrification and others that focused on their relationship with the pollution that still persists in the local environment. Nevertheless, little attention has been dedicated to the impacts created by policies for green building construction beyond the local and regional context, particularly regarding their impacts on the Global South. This research aims to analyse to what extent the EU Taxonomy system addresses decolonial environmental justice concerns by conducting document analysis on its technical report and focusing on material extraction from the Global South for green building construction in Europe. The preliminary outcome of this research would shed light on possible neo-colonial biases of European green policies and contribute to the debate on how to achieve a sustainable city considering environmental and decolonial issues.