Feature
COP26 And What The Built Environment Can Do To Assist With Climate Change Targets
In this article, Ewan Henderson, Senior Consultant at Control Risks talks about how facilities management can help create greater sustainability and increase social responsibility to deliver net-zero solutions.
For the first time in more than two decades, this year’s COP summit, held in Glasgow, Scotland, dedicated a day to the subject of cities and the built environment, and the contribution this sector makes to global emissions.
Cities and the built environment account for nearly 40% of global energy and activity-related emissions, around 10% of worldwide employment and approximately 50% of global wealth. Without concrete actions from the built environment, the set target of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” will be hard to achieve.
Nevertheless, despite being a significant stakeholder (and contributor), the built environment, and therefore facilities management, is often overlooked and not included in negotiations despite its unique capability to deliver net-zero solutions. The built environment offers many solutions needed to tackle climate change while concurrently advancing social and economic development. For that reason, the inclusion of the sector in this year’s COP was significant. However, having been in the spotlight and centre stage, it is time to deliver.
What does this mean for facilities management, and how can we work towards creating greater sustainability, increasing social responsibility while lowering our exposure to risk and reducing our sector’s carbon footprint? There’s an old saying that goes, “there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” Clearly, this isn’t to be taken literally; no-one is encouraging dining on elephants, but it is good advice about tackling a massive project. Achieving net zero, increasing our corporate responsibility and reducing enterprise and environmental risk without significantly impacting the bottom line may seem daunting, overwhelming, and even impossible. But it can be accomplished gradually by taking it on just a little at a time, in bitesize chunks.
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Nobody has the entire roadmap. This article isn’t written to provide all of the answers; however, it gives some guidance on tackling the issues and working towards successful results.
Working with specialist consultancy firms, facilities managers can identify ways that a specific or desired outcome from a project can provide value and results outside the original scope. The immediate benefit of this is amortising cost, but other less tangible benefits pay dividends in the mid-to-long term. For example, in the built environment, safety and security planning at the earliest stages of a construction or regeneration project allows adequate and aesthetic security controls to be designed into the project instead of applied to a finished product. As well as creating safe and secure environments, this approach reduces cost in the short term by recycling byproducts of the project and negating the need for excessive security architecture, such as bollards and fences. Earlier involvement by facilities management in the design and renovations process also ensures the project brief is informed by aftercare and vice versa, which can impact efficiencies.
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