36 EMBODIED CARBON COUNTS: THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWER OF PART Z ROUND TABLE REVIEW
HARNESSING INVESTOR CLIMATE GOALS Will Arnold said that his key motivator as author of the Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard was to “bring consistency around a green building defi nition” for investors
ATTENDEES Will Arnold, Head, Sustainable Materials, Useful Simple Trust Kirsty Girvan, Senior Policy Advisor, UKGBC Tim den Dekker, Associate, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios Stephanie Baker, Sustainability Consultant, SEES (Sadler Energy & Environmental Services) Ewan Duffi n, Associate Director, Harley Haddow Simon Sturgis, Founder, Targeting Zero & Chair, RIBA Sustainability Futures Group Ivan Jovanovic, Director, Sustainability & Environmental Design, Atelier Ten Simon Wyatt, Partner, Sustainability, Cundall Ellen Willis, Head of Sustainability, Chetwoods Diego Padilla-Philipps, Director of Decarbonisation, WSP
SPONSORS’ ATTENDEES Lee Cowen, Managing Director, Milbank Concrete Products
as well as the already foregrounded operational carbon reductions. The hoped-for amendment to the Building Regulations that is Part Z – an industry-led regulation that would explicitly govern embodied carbon (albeit only for schemes above 1000 m2
or over 10 homes),
remains in the wilderness. But the NZCBS, on which Part Z is based, is out, and beginning to alter the landscape. Our meeting was crucial, however, to not only raise awareness of the need to consider embodied carbon as part of sustainability drivers in projects, but also to identify how it is being sidelined currently in procurement. Among our multi-disciplinary group we were pleased to have embodied carbon trailblazer Will Arnold, now of non-profi t group Useful Simple Trust, who was the lead author of Part Z working with Government, and architect Simon Sturgis, who advised the Government’s Environmental Audit Committee on whole-life carbon assessment in 2022.
There was consensus that the industry could not drive such innovations into the mainstream without strong regulation, despite recent industry initiatives (such as NZCBS, and RICS’ whole life carbon assessment tools). Whole-life carbon assessment encompasses both upfront and operational carbon, but perhaps more than in any other area of projects, early stage involvement of the supply chain is the only way to ensure the embodied portion is not an afterthought at best.
The bottom line is that there has been scant progress on reducing embodied carbon in construction since Covid. UKGBC, represented by Kirsty Girvan, estimates that it has only dropped a paltry 4% since 2018, so how can the industry be incentivised to do better, and do we wait for regulation at our peril?
The Industry’s Embedded Embodied Challenge Tim den Dekker of Stirling Prize-winning practice Feilden Clegg Bradley opened his comments by saying decisively that mandating embodied carbon was “not something that the markets can sort out; it needs government to set the lead, otherwise we’re not going to get embodied carbon down.”
He addressed the issue of potential unintended consequences from a shift to focusing on embodied carbon, and that there’s an “assumption that those consequences will be negative,” adding: “I think there will be a lot of positive unintended consequences.” Ven Dekker wanted to “dispel this myth that it’s really hard to do a good embodied carbon assessment,” but said that it was about not “wanting everything all at once,” but proceeding in incremental steps: “let’s focus on the easy bits fi rst.” Will Arnold characterised a mixed picture in the wider context of both increasing resistance to net zero as a goal, but also increasing uptake of embodied carbon reduction. He said the politicisation of net zero by populist parties had made it “way harder than it was three or four years ago,” however also that he saw clients “who want to act being more able to do so because of things like the NZCBS standard. Arnold said he was concerned that mainstream projects were being held back by the “wider rhetoric,” although it’s “easier than ever to do [embodied carbon reduction].”
He concluded that developers were having to justify pushing the agenda on the basis of being “lower cost, lower risk, all these other metrics, they can’t justify it on being lower carbon.” Arnold cited one client that “was entirely justifying it around supply chain resilience – alternative cements that they don’t have to import, because of the global situation.”
Our round table found that, as ever, capital cost is the most pervasive issue, with a downturn in the housing market having unfortunately hampered the case for investing in mainstream sustainability benefi ts, with speakers citing a lack of demand among consumers for higher sustainability homes. But Simon Wyatt of Cundall said that in certain sectors of the residential market,
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