1st Place Dr. Hans Riegel Award
1st Prize winner of the Dr. Hans Riegel Award for a scientific thesis on real estate and climate change.
THE AWARD
The Dr. Hans Riegel-Fachpreise are awarded each year by the Kaiserschild-Stiftung together with the Institute of Subject-Specific Education at the University of Innsbruck. School leavers from Tyrol and Vorarlberg submit the vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit they wrote for their Matura, and subject juries at the university assess them against academic criteria rather than school ones. 2023 was the eighth year the prizes were awarded.
I received 1st place for my thesis on the relationship between the real estate industry and climate change.
WHAT THE THESIS WAS ABOUT
Der Zusammenhang zwischen Immobilienwirtschaft und Klimawandel asks how construction and climate act on one another, and it takes that question in both directions.
The first direction is the one people expect. The built environment is responsible for roughly a third of global CO2 emissions and around 60% of all resource consumption. The thesis separates those emissions into the ones a building causes while it is being used and the grey emissions already spent before anyone moves in, compares building standards internationally, and covers land take and soil sealing.
The second direction gets less attention: climate change is itself a constraint on what the industry is able to build. Extreme weather events, a world population heading toward ten billion by 2050, and a carbon budget that is nearly spent all force the sector to adapt. The later chapters work through what that adaptation looks like, covering resource efficiency, recycling, building typologies, material efficiency through component optimisation, and a direct comparison of concrete and timber construction.
HOW IT WAS RESEARCHED
The foundation is a literature review of academic publications, edited volumes and material from the German Federal Environment Agency. Where the literature left questions open, I closed them with an expert interview: Prof. Werner Sobek, of the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK) at the University of Stuttgart, gave me 53 minutes in Vienna in November 2022. His answers are worked into the relevant chapters and the full transcript is appended to the thesis. A talk of his on emission savings and the construction of tomorrow is what drew me to the subject in the first place.
WHAT I LEFT OUT
The thesis had a 60,000 character limit. That meant leaving out most of the specific measures for improving the resilience of individual buildings, and structural engineering entirely, neither of which changes the argument but both of which would deepen it. With more room, the extensions worth making are the structural consequences of material-saving measures, CO2 sequestration in concrete, and an honest assessment of how renewable heating systems actually perform. Carbon-neutral concrete is the part I would most want to return to.