While at RoadExpo last year, we attended a presentation on climate resilience and carbon management in infrastructure
The presentation, delivered by Kevin Smith from Waterman Aspen, gave us considerable insight into the purpose and benefits of PAS 2080 to our clients.
Civil engineering is currently responsible for 53% of the world’s carbonisation. Importantly for our clients, approximately 16% of this carbonisation is something that engineers have direct control over at procurement and planning stage. By implementing PAS 2080, our clients follow industry best practice and reduce carbon emissions where they have the control to do so.
What is PAS 2080?
Developed in 2016 and updated in 2023, PAS 2080 is the document that details best practice for carbon management across the lifecycle of buildings. It is the global standard for carbon reduction in infrastructure, which takes a holistic approach by guiding management of an asset’s carbon from cradle to grave. The 2023 update also ensures guidance covers more than just infrastructure; PAS 2080 is now applicable to the whole built environment, emphasising the importance of reducing whole life carbon emissions for our clients.
What does PAS 2080 do?
PAS 2080 is central to achieving net zero by 2050, as it aligns the built environment with the necessary transition measures, making its implementation crucial for our clients. However, it is a guidance document and therefore does not prescribe a method for reducing carbon. Rather, it challenges our clients who are delivering infrastructure projects to question how they can integrate carbon management measures into their designs for reduced carbonisation throughout assets’ whole life. By implementing PAS 2080, our clients consider carbon in their decision-making at every stage of their process.
PAS 2080 is not about reporting or monitoring compliance. It is about benefitting the wider environment by guiding our clients’ engineers in implementing carbon reduction measures that apply and operate throughout a building’s whole life.
The focus on early collaboration
A key change occurring in the 2023 update, is the major focus PAS 2080 now places on early collaboration with all relevant stakeholders. PAS 2080 looks at reducing carbon emissions across the whole supply chain, and so early collaboration is vital to maximise all opportunities for doing so. Maximising these opportunities at an early stage not only prevents the avoidable and harmful impacts of carbon but also costs our clients less in comparison to integrating reduction measures overtime. Early collaboration also encourages our clients’ supply chain partners to uptake carbon management measures by working together to develop more sustainable design, construction and maintenance planning.
The focus on early collaboration reflects PAS 2080’s aim of creating consistency in the carbon management process. For example, consistency in target setting, opportunities identification, assessment, use of data, procurement, continuous improvement, leadership and collaboration for decarbonisation. By implementing PAS 2080, our clients can manage carbon with their supply chain partners from the outset to realise greener project outcomes.
How our clients can use PAS 2080
To illustrate how our clients can implement PAS 2080, we draw your attention to PAS 2080’s major focus on using more sustainable materials for example, swapping out steel and concrete. This aspect is one that our clients can leverage greatly. Sustainable materials may be more costly to our clients at the outset; however, their early inclusion can also save our clients’ money and resources in the future by preventing the need for last minute design changes or expensive solutions to achieve carbon targets. By developing intelligent designs that incorporate more sustainable materials, our clients can leverage PAS 2080 to demonstrate their commitment to carbon reduction from the very beginning.
What benefits can be gained by implementing PAS 2080?
We have briefly broken down what PAS 2080 is and the focus it places on early collaboration, but what benefits can our clients reap from its implementation? As discussed in Kevin’s presentation, the benefits include:
- aligning with net zero transition
- integrating carbon into decision-making at all levels
- increasing infrastructure’s value and decreasing whole life costs
- demonstrating your commitment to reducing carbon
- consolidating your environmental reputation
- building an innovative culture that encourages development of smarter designs by using more sustainable materials
- promoting stakeholder engagement and wider uptake of carbon management through early collaboration
- creating consistency in framing whole life carbon reduction and the carbon management process throughout your supply chain.
Using PAS 2080 enables our clients to operate greener and cleaner while realising the above benefits and playing an important role in the journey to net zero.