The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), working as part of an international coalition of built environment professional groups, has jointly published for consultation the world’s first international standard for reporting carbon emissions across all areas of construction.
The consultation will seek input from industry on how to make sure carbon emissions factor directly into the extensive decision making that goes behind planning construction projects. This is to be followed shortly by new RICS guidance for professionals on how to assess ‘embodied carbon’.
In addition, RICS has led a group of construction sector bodies in the development of an emissions database for logging the climate impact of all construction projects in the UK. Measuring carbon, and then logging and analysing the data will aid industry to move forward in lessening their environmental impact.
Under development by RICS in partnership with BRE, CIOB, CIBSE, UKGBC, ICE, IStructE, RIBA and The Carbon Trust, the new built environment carbon emissions database will allow professionals to log construction projects – whether that’s new homes, offices, or infrastructure – when ready later this year.
The database will give an indication of how much carbon has been emitted during the manufacturing and construction process (the upfront ’embodied carbon’), along with future maintenance, energy use and demolition, and enable designers to identify and avoid carbon-intensive products in favour of more sustainable materials that will help the UK get to net-zero by 2050.
Commenting on the database James Fiske, Director of RICS’ Building Cost Information Service, said: “It’s not every day that an entire industry comes together in agreement over climate change. The new database – coupled with the ICMS consultation – are real examples of the construction sector uniting in its mission to tackle carbon emissions and meet its commitment to net zero.”“We’re looking forward to launching the working database later this year and will be using the expertise within RICS and our partner professional bodies to make this happen.”
ICMS, as a comprehensive standard developed by a coalition of nearly fifty organisations (many of which in the UK are also working together on the built environment carbon database) including RICS, will urge professionals to report levels of carbon emissions for projects to clients.
Following the consultation, the final ICMS standards are expected to be published in November 2021 followed by updated RICS guidance on carbon assessment – which sets out a universal methodology for calculating carbon emissions. This will form a toolkit to enable decision makers to minimise the carbon footprint of all construction projects.
Both the UK-based built environment carbon database and the globally applicable ICMS consultation come as the world heads toward the COP26 conference in Glasgow this November, with the overarching goals set by national governments to achieve net-zero carbon emissions in the decades to come to battle the rapidly changing climate.
