THECOSTOFINACTION
What the absence of a standard costs
A conversation about a standard usually opens with "what will it cost". The question is half wrong: inaction has a price too — it simply is not a separate budget line, and so it appears to be zero. This section is a method for calculating it.
Why there are no numbers here
Because we have not verified any. Trade press carries estimates of the cost premium and payback period of green construction; we do not quote them, because behind them is no method anyone can re-check. Publishing someone else’s figure on the strength of a retelling would be exactly what this whole project is built against. Method and stated assumptions first; numbers after the pilot. Anyone can calculate with this method without waiting for us.
What the bill consists of
Six items. For each we state what is to be counted and where the data comes from — including the cases where today it does not exist.
Evacuation and demolition instead of prevention
The cost of evacuating and demolishing a building against the cost of the measure that would have kept it usable.
Norilsk supplies a ready example where the arithmetic needs no method: around 250 buildings in the centre are due for demolition because the ground beneath them is thawing, while stabilising that ground costs less than rehousing the people above it. The difference between those two figures is the cost of inaction in its purest form.
Doing the public realm twice
The cost of planting carried out without a standard and lost, plus the cost of doing it again.
Requires municipal spending on a specific territory and survival rates for the planting. We found neither in machine-readable form — see the register of the state of the data.
Lost property value
The price difference between blocks with a degraded and a preserved environment, all else equal.
Calculable from open transaction data, but it needs comparable blocks and control for other factors. This is the most contestable item, and it cannot be presented without a strong method — an opponent will take it apart first.
Health costs
The load on healthcare associated with the quality of the urban environment: heat stress, air quality, nowhere to move.
Requires medical statistics tied to territory. No such linkage is openly available, and it is a separate register line we have not yet opened.
Connection costs where capacity was not planned
The cost of a grid connection when no free capacity turned out to be nearby, against the cost of siting that accounted for it.
Here we hit the same wall as the map: free capacity must be disclosed, yet it cannot be assembled nationally. While that field stays empty, this item can only be calculated by hand and for one site at a time.
Forgone income of a territory
Investment that never arrived where the environment and infrastructure cannot host production or housing.
The largest in magnitude and the hardest to prove. It can only be counted honestly by comparing similar territories with different fates — that is, once a history of observations has accumulated.
What is missing to make the calculation
Of the six items, two run into absent data, two require a strong comparison method, and only one can be computed right now — the one where Norilsk has already run the experiment for us. That is the answer to why this project starts with data rather than slogans: without the register and the map, the cost of inaction stays rhetoric.