Assemble | Asia's Built Environment: The Climate Opportunity We Can't Afford to Miss

​The biggest climate story of this decade is a building story. Half the buildings that will exist in 2050 have not been built yet. Indonesia is putting up three million homes a year against a backlog of ten to fifteen million. India's housing need and floor space are expanding by 40%, adding the equivalent of a new city the size of Los Angeles every year. This is the fastest wave of construction in human history, and behind the numbers is the best story in development: hundreds of millions of families moving into a home with a solid roof, a door that locks, power and clean water, and for many, a formal address for the first time.

​At NYCW Assemble is highlighting Asia because that is where the gigatonnes are. New analysis by the Carbon Trust, commissioned with Tara Climate Foundation, puts cumulative building emissions in Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Thailand at 36 gigatonnes between now and 2050.

​What is missing is implementation, and coverage: the rules often apply to large new commercial buildings, while homes, which are up to nine-tenths of the floor area, sit outside them. That is the shape of this opportunity, and it is why comparatively small amounts of well-placed capital move gigatonnes.

​Assemble is a philanthropic alliance built to close the gap between the scale of the built environment opportunity and the resources directed at it. We raise and deploy coordinated capital. We connect the field's strongest organisations around shared strategy. We identify the interventions most likely to shift tipping points, in the right geographies, through the right mechanisms, at the right moment, and we resource them to act. Not incrementally. Irreversibly.

​During New York Climate Week we're bringing funders from around the world together to set out our strategy for Asia. We'll go deep on India, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan and South Korea, and show how we work across the four drivers that move this sector: government mandates, public-political demand, market scale and financial leverage. We're hoping to see how our approach connects to your own strategy.

We're hosting on the 37th floor of the Empire State Building. It's the deep retrofit that proved the business case. A fitting room for this conversation.




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