Housing seems to be the eternal pending issue in Catalonia. The community leads the needs for an affordable home in Spain, with the lack of 226,000 homes (761,000 throughout the State). On the other hand, 80% of the national real estate stock is more than 40 years old and is energy inefficient (data for Catalonia is not available), making it one of the oldest in Europe.
That is, it is necessary to build new housing at affordable prices and energetically rehabilitate the existing one, not only to mitigate the climate crisis, but also to combat energy poverty. The latter has reached record numbers in Catalonia: with 19% of homes that cannot afford to turn on the heating or the fan, according to Idescat data from 2022.
“The best day to start was yesterday, but the second best day is today,” acknowledges Greta Tresserra, member of the governing board of the Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya. “More than seven million homes must be rehabilitated by 2050, about 350,000 a year, according to the zero-emissions commitments of the Paris Agreement, and currently only about 25,000 are being rehabilitated annually. We are not prepared to multiply the current rehabilitation rate by 14,” warns the expert.
“We are going very slowly and the problem is aggravated by the lack of labor in the sector,” adds Albert Grau, head of institutional relations at Rockwool and member of the Efficient Energy Cluster of Catalonia (CEEC). According to the Business Activity Survey (EBAE) of the Bank of Spain, 49% of companies in the sector point to the shortage of workers as a limiting factor in their activity.
Grau points to another problem in the sector: “The buildings already constructed are not prepared to reformulate their use or to be able to recover the materials that are deposited in them; “Having to tear down a building to build a new one is a great failure.” In this sense, the CEEC spokesperson highlights that “a third of all construction waste in Europe, some 500 million tons, occurs in Spain; This means that in other countries it has been built in a different way.”
As a large generator of waste, the European construction industry is also a large devourer of resources: it uses 50% of the materials that are extracted, around 30% of the water and 40% of the available energy. Furthermore, the manufacturing of most of the materials used in construction generates very high percentages of greenhouse gases. But the environmental impacts do not end once construction is completed: buildings are responsible for 25% of emissions in Spain and 30% of the country’s energy consumption.
The countries of the European Union are working on a European Directive on Energy Efficiency in Buildings that must lead buildings to climate neutrality by 2050. “Its approval will mark a before and after. There has been a lot of pressure from the construction sector for Spain to close the directive during his mandate and the truth is that Spanish officials are doing things very well,” says Albert Grau.
The new directive includes measures to make existing buildings more energy efficient and less dependent on fossil fuels, requires all new constructions to be zero emissions from 2028 (in 2026 in the case of new occupied buildings, exploited or owned by public authorities), and implements changes in energy certificates, among other proposals.
