BARRIERS TO GREEN RETROFITTING OF EXISTING CONDOMINIUMS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

With growing environmental concerns over climate change and global warming, building sustainability has been gaining momentum over the past decade. Given its expanding population and consequently expected increase in energy demand over time, Singapore has stepped up its efforts in mitigating the detrimental impacts of buildings on the environment. A substantially larger proportion of existing buildings as compared to new buildings in Singapore in every given year calls for greater sustainability efforts to be directed towards existing buildings. However, although existing residential buildings in Singapore account for a considerable amount of the nation’s energy consumption, few have obtained green mark certification since the introduction of the Green Mark Scheme in 2005. Existing condominiums, in particular, have not been listed for any certification award at least over the past five years. Given that Management Corporations (MCs) of condominiums are empowered to handle their domestic affairs, the government has limited control over the decisions made by them. As such, the motivation to bring green retrofits into play is largely dependent on MCs themselves. Therefore, there is significance to explore the possible obstacles that are hindering MCs from accelerating the process of green retrofitting in their condominiums. This research aims to identify and rank the top five barriers out of a suggested list of eight that MC Councils face in recommending for green retrofits to be implemented in common areas of existing condominiums. It seeks to find out if there are additional barriers that may be specific to condominiums apart from the eight obstacles identified from literature research. Subsequently, possible solutions will be proposed. The research methodologies employed in this study are literature review and face-to-face interviews. The interview respondents include MC council members and strata residential managers of condominiums. Based on the interview findings, the top five common barriers selected by the respondents are (i) high initial capital cost, (ii) residents’ unwillingness to pay, (iii) lack of practicality, (iv) insufficient grants and subsidies, and (v) low or unpredictable Return on Investment (ROI) in order of significance. Cost-related obstacles are concluded as the most significant, and possible solutions are proposed in this study. A larger interview sample size might have improved the accuracy of the results obtained.