“That’s my frustration, when people say to me ‘we need a common metric for carbon’. I have no idea what a tonne of carbon looks like, so if I don’t know, how can we engage anyone else?” When Kirsten Henson of KLH Sustainability made that point at CM’s round table discussion on the next steps for sustainability in construction, there was general agreement in the room. Henson had advised the ODA delivery partner CLM on going “higher, faster and stronger” in its sustainability achievements. If she didn’t know, then everyone else – including yours truly – could relax.
Sustainability in construction today often seems to be about measuring and reporting, calculations and certificates, setting over-arching targets like “Halve waste to landfill” and then finding a way to make the figures work. Clearly, against all these competing claims, it’s helpful to have a common metric to assess one saving-the-planet initiative against another.
As Sir Robert McAlpine’s Amie Shuttleworth pointed out, adopting carbon was a means of putting a “value” on interventions and “communicating with accountants”. But for the average industry professional, or member of the public, a unit of measurement that no one understands is another barrier between what we’re trying to achieve and the sense of personal engagement we need to progress.
Besides, as the six practitioners on our panel agree, we’re in danger of complicating an issue that is pretty simple and people do grasp intuitively: sustainability is about resource efficiency and, in Henson’s words, “make do and mend”. So one of the themes that emerged from a lively discussion was the need to frame the sustainability challenge in different terms for different audiences rather aiming for a single point of reference: the finance-focused decision makers on the board; the local communities in stakeholder consultations; the designers who need more freedom to innovate; the site operatives – the largest group with the most potential to change outcomes.
The industry has made huge strides in the past five years in putting sustainability at the heart of projects and mainstreaming the issue at a corporate level. But the danger of letting sustainability become dominated by the opaque discipline of “carbon accounting” and a legislation-driven improvement agenda is that it loses some of the passion and immediacy that characterised the issue pre-2008.
No one’s suggesting we don’t need Part L 2013 or the long-awaited Allowable Solutions framework for zero carbon homes. But maybe we need to loosen and widen the terms of the debate so sustainability can reposition itself on the leading edge. And, as the panel suggested, find alternative value measurements: value to the community; value to local businesses; value to local health outcomes. They’re all sustainable goals after all.
Elaine Knutt, editor
