Six months after the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, columnist Kunle Barker wrote in the UK Architects' Journal to take a stand against the industry’s oneiric focus on “lofty ideals of zero-carbon and on soundbites” and towards a more considered system of new project evaluation, advocating for the “need to develop a viability methodology that is independent, objective and focused on carbon impact versus social need.”

“Let’s rid ourselves of these conceited phrases and instead focus on the real issues,” he wrote, arguing that need will always push architects into costly demolition efforts and away from restoring structures that may, in many cases, be better suited for adaptive reuse. “Offsetting is not sustainable. In fact, it's not even close to being sustainable, and most worrying of all, it is allowing lazy, ego-driven designs to be accepted by us all. We must find an objective and fair way to assess if (and how) a building should be constructed. This is the only way the built environment can become part of the climate solution.”

Environmentalists have been warning against misconceptions of the practice for decades now. Planted trees even in protected rainforest areas like Brazil typically take up to twenty years to be of any negating value to a new construction project, and this particular form of sequestration is generally considered to be a poor alternative to an upfront reduction in carbon footprints. As Barker points out, it could take the unviable reforestation of an area five times the size of India to offset the amount of carbon required to keep the world’s climate within the 1.5-degree threshold required to avoid ecological collapse by midcentury.