Knowing the baseline is critical to delivering carbon reductions

As COP28 comes into focus, when world leaders and policy makers will once again grapple with the challenge of limiting global temperature rises to the 1.5°C ambition, it is important for us to take stock as an industry on what progress we have made in reducing the carbon cost of our work.

We may be a key enabler to a low carbon future, but with the built environment accounting for an estimated 40% of global emissions, it is critical for us to understand exactly where we are on our own journey. Benchmarking, metrics and measurement are absolutely central to this.

While many businesses may have already been doing this, their work is often siloed and, like most matters when it comes to climate change, cross-industry collaboration and sharing knowledge is essential.

The launch of a new free to access infrastructure carbon assessment benchmarking tool – the Built Environment Carbon Database (BECD) – last month, creates a platform for the industry to do just that.

Created by the Building Cost Information Service (BCIS), the BECD will allow calculation of the embodied carbon in all elements of a project, rather than an estimated single value for an overall project.

This breakdown of the carbon embodied in individual elements of a project, such as a roundabout or flyover, is the critical difference to existing carbon calculators. It creates a benchmark for a typical civil engineering structure against which design teams can really analyse their work. This will enable engineers to determine at an early stage whether they could do things differently or better to result in an improved outcome for both the project and the climate.

However, for such a database to be a true success, it needs data. And lots of it. Especially as the concept is rolled out to sectors beyond the initial launch for the highways industry.

Mott MacDonald is the first company to share its client approved data with BECD and anyone can use that information today to benchmark their work, but the figures generated will become more accurate as more businesses contribute to the database.

All of the data included so far has been harvested from highways projects delivered by Mott MacDonald over the last seven years and has only been shared with BECD with the blessing from clients. The data submitted has drawn extensively from projects developed using Mott MacDonald’s BIM-enabled carbon modelling solution Moata Carbon Portal.

While the benefits of this new benchmarking tool are understood and many have been keen to use it, sharing the data needed to maximise those benefits is not seen as simple by many. Sharing data is something we are not good at as an industry, not least because we often see data as giving us competitive advantage in a tough market.

However, tackling climate change is a collective responsibility. We can only make the necessary changes at the pace required by working together, sharing our data, best practice and learnings. Transparency requires careful handling, but to engender industry collaboration BECD takes a significant step in doing that through anonymised data.

The type of data needed probably already exists within your business. In brief, the data submitted by Mott MacDonald is drawn from bills of quantities for multiple, similar projects. Carbon emission factors have been individually assigned to constituent materials and construction processes, using best available data from suppliers and resources such as the commonly used ICE database. They have been aggregated to produce “whole project” carbon values.

Whether you work in the highways industry or another sector of the built environment, I urge you to go and look at how BECD works today and consider how you will use it and what you can share to ensure we can go further and faster on carbon reduction.

During the launch of BECD, BCIS CEO James Fiske discussed the industry challenges around sharing data but asked: “If Mott MacDonald can do it, what’s stopping everyone else?”

Let’s take collective responsibility together and make sure our industry is leading from the front on carbon reduction.

This article was first published in New Civil Engineer.