However, this needs to be included in standards and regulative frameworks in Africa.

The potentials are enormous: 80% of all urban structures that will have been built in 2050 in sub-Saharan Africa are yet to be built, this offers a tremendous potential to immediately implement best available technologies, and to work with sustainable, resource saving, and local construction materials. Instead of preaching we should learn from the global South, where implementation of novel approaches and sustainable materials is much easier, whereas errors of the past can be directly avoided and a framework can be created that makes sustainability aspects pivotal to all regulations that are yet to come. Therefore, the question arises, who are we in the Northern hemisphere to preach? We do not have much to show, and actually messed many things up in the past, which cannot be easily erased. With the exceptions of South Africa, Seychelles, Equatorial Guinea, Botswana, Mauritius and Gabon, all sub-Saharan African countries lie below the threshold with a median value of only 0.31 tons of CO2 per capita ( ).

Industrialised societies of the global North produce significantly higher per-capita carbon emissions than the threshold that needs to be achieved in order to achieve the 2 ☌ Paris climate goal ( ). However, there might be a mismatch between self-perception and actual numbers. Today, often some countries in the Northern hemisphere claim to be or become the leader of climate friendly technologies in construction.

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