The value of carbon in construction

The biggest challenge facing us all is climate change and, given the high level of emissions generated across the infrastructure sector, how we manage carbon across our sector will be critical to ensuring we keep global temperatures to a safe level.

The Welsh Government declared a climate emergency in 2020 and was joined by a range of local authorities across Wales. Of course, all governments across the UK have Net Zero commitments with carbon increasingly becoming part of the “conversation”.

Alasdair Reisner, CEO of CECA, explained that unless and until we “value” carbon as part of the planning, design and construction process we will struggle to manage its impacts. And it is clear that despite government commitments performance across the construction sector is, at best, mixed.

Construction clients are struggling to find and agree ways to assess supplier carbon performance and this leads to inconsistencies in including and assessing lower carbon options in bids. This is compounded by a lack of understanding of carbon management methodologies by SMEs and a low incentivization for those better performing suppliers. There is a need for clear and consistent advice across the whole sector.

To address this the Construction Leadership Council has developed CO2nstruct Zero, which is a whole of industry campaign to cut carbon with a single overarching programme and action plan including measurable targets and performance criteria.

In an effort to support SMEs CECA also published its guidance for SMEs on carbon management in Autumn 2021: Demystifying Carbon for SMEs. The guidance explains key concepts, methods for managing carbon including reference to PAS 2080, how to estimate, monitor and report performance and options to reduce carbon through their operations.

Carbon Reduction for SMEs

CECA

And our 2021 Conference Joint Report Decarbonising Our Infrastructure action plan for doing exactly that in Wales.

What is abundantly clear is that, if we as a sector want to reduce carbon emissions, we need to value carbon as part of our operations and work together across public and private sectors to deliver reductions. A transactional approach of passing carbon management responsibilities down the supply chain will simply not work.