Sunand Prasad poses some questions from the architect's point of view

Sunand Prasad

Thank you very much, Peter, that was brilliantly handled, and an amazing amount of stuff came out of that.

I was thinking, in what way is this sector different from any other? Because you know, you go to sessions about what you can do about housing, what you can do in schools, but here we are and what we are doing is museums. Now, thinking that actually there are probably far more similarities than there are actually differences, in terms of the building, businesses and so on.

But culturally, the kind of cultural differences, materially, probably, the kinds of things that Mark's been talking about - about conservation, relative humidities and temperature controls, possibly the slightly bureaucratised environment in which they are enforced, rather than continuously questioned and continuously revisited, it seems to be one area where there really needs to be a lot of attention paid. And I detect that the level of engineering, and understanding and science, isn't of very high quality at the moment. For example, what passive measures might be put in place? Where will the kind of right degree of passive measure and the lowering the standards actually intersect and produce a decent answer, rather than just assume it's going to be like that, so we go and have mechanical ventilation, which I think we had here by the way, and I'm feeling cold, [laugh], on a day like this. So then there are other things like visitor numbers and travel - which I'm sure is a problem that so many other spaces - it's far from only museums - and staff travel and the movement of goods and artefacts, and so on. So, probably, there's quite a lot to learn from other sectors, there may be one bit which is specialised, but it's probably quite a small bit, and probably in the scheme of things the energy used on that small bit is probably not that great. Although, of course, this is, we very well know we have to actually do everything on every front and not say, this is a priority and this is not.

So it seems to me that the main thing I have learnt is that we are in a learning phase. There is a lot to learn, for example, from abroad, from each other, from just benchmarking what everybody is doing and seeing how, perhaps surprisingly, you find some museums, for reasons that are not yet understood, seem to be doing much better than others. I don't understand why that is.

When we benchmarked, when we measured the carbon footprint of the RIBA, we expected it to be extremely poor, but it turned out to be roughly medium in terms of office buildings. That's nothing to boast about, by the way, but it was, I wasn't exactly relieved but I thought that's strange, it's, it's actually around 70 to 80 tons per square metre. And of course that's the reason - it's a very deep planned building, it's a very, very deep planned and a very compact building, so, quite unexpectedly, this kind of elephant is quite useful in some ways, elephant is not actually doing too badly. [laughter] So there are those kinds of learnings to do and measurement and, above all, I think there's an enormous urgency to this. It's fantastic this is happening, but there was one small bit in the graph that Chris showed where he showed the predicted lowering of… raising of Arctic temperatures and the loss of ice, Arctic sea ice. And the real observations are so significantly far different from what was predicted that I think a lot of people are wondering whether all these models which are conservative models - and you said that because they are like consensus - these conservative models may well be far too conservative and their situation may be worse than we think.

How to convey this is a big challenge. As communicators, the museum sector, I think, if it could actually communicate the urgency of the issue, and that would be an enormous contribution for a start. And then, of course, to show that through their own corporate behaviour and to advertise and make known what that corporate behaviour change is, would be a great thing to have. But the most important thing, it seems to me, is to just communicate just how important it is to do this, and if you like, how overdue this action is. Thank you. [applause]