Nigel Howard:
Nigel read "Limits to Growth" aged 19 in 1972, and that has shaped his entire career and now — into retirement — his climate activism.
He is qualified in Chemistry, specialising in Life Cycle Environmental Impact assessment. He has held influential positions in the US, UK, and Australia, and consulted to a wide range of companies, governments, and NGO’s.
He originates from the UK, where as Director of the Centre for Sustainable Construction, he completed the BRE environmental profiles methodology resulting from a 10-year long consultation with 24 building-product sectors. From this, he developed the UK Green Guides to Specification for Commercial buildings and Homes. He was responsible for the BREEAM98 building rating tools, and pioneered the launch of ECOHomes. In prior roles, he worked for Davis Langdon Consultants, for the Building Research Energy Conservation Support Unit, British Gas, and the Greater London Council’s Scientific Branch.
Before coming to Australia, Nigel was Vice President for the US Green Building Council — responsible for developing, establishing, and implementing the suite of LEED building environmental rating systems used throughout the US, Canada, and India. He was also responsible for establishing the LEED Accredited Professional training programs and credentials. Nigel founded the Edge Environment consultancy in Manly, which now employs over 100 people and has offices in 4 other countries.
He has contributed internationally to IEA Annex 31 and ISO TC39 committees, and was a founding member of the World Green Building Council, promoting the establishment of Green Building Councils. He was also a founding member of iiSBE, collaborating internationally on the technical development of building rating tools. Nigel is a former President of the Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society.
Nigel now leads the Northern Beaches Climate Action Network comprising nearly 50 climate action groups on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. As a keyboard warrior for the climate emergency, he is highly critical of IPCC for their recklessly complacent advice to UN member states, for failing to include the 22 compounding feedback loops within their modelling, and for failing to interpret the climate science from a precautionary perspective. He is especially worried that the trashing of climate records from 2023 may imply that the compounding feedback loops are already triggered — leading unstoppably to 4-6 C° of warming.
He is astonished by our collective complacency, given that climate change is an existential threat to the survival of our species forever. And he notes that without technical and proactive approaches, it would take 2 thousand years for our climate to return to the safe zone — even IF we stopped all emissions today! But we are still opening new coal, oil and gas extraction facilities!
Recognizing both the inherent risk of many atmospheric geoengineering proposals and the high cost and energy demands of suggested space-based solutions, he has applied his attention recently to versions of geoengineering that can work safely with a minimum of perverse outcomes. This includes looking at affordable technologies that can be adopted globally — advocating for urgent research, for example, on the impacts of basalt seeding of oceans to raise alkalinity and precipitate out carbonates. This would reduce dissolved CO2 so that more can dissolve from the atmosphere, noting that CO2 is 50 times more concentrated in seawater than in the atmoshere.