Societies across the globe are simultaneously trying to build significantly more housing to meet the needs of a growing population and emit significantly less greenhouse gas emissions to meet the pressures of the climate crisis. This is precipitating debates about the nature of sustainable housing. ‘Conventional wisdom’ holds that tall buildings are bad for the environment coinciding with longstanding skepticism of such buildings, yet the research and data on this question is often anecdotal or incomplete and contradictory. In this paper we wade into the debate on how to build sustainable housing, particularly with regards to building design and height. This paper examines the effects of building height on embodied greenhouse gas emissions for 5-to-20 storey reinforced concrete buildings. We find that while height does minimally increase embodied emissions per rentable area, the impact is within the noise of other design choices, particularly slab thickness and design tranches – number of storeys with identical design. These results show that the debate around tall buildings and sustainability is too often focused on the wrong question and opportunities to design much better buildings are being overlooked.
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