Sustainability update

FIDIC starts to live up to its climate charter commitments

The climate challenge is one that no section of society can ignore if we are to achieve a sustainable quality of life. Never before has it been so important that the entire infrastructure sector is engaged in the debate about how we address this issue and tackle it’s significance and scale going forward.

FIDIC has been motivated to outline its leadership response on the behalf of the consulting engineering community because of the urgency of the climate crisis and the scale of the changes required. The FIDIC Climate Change Charter sets out in basic, initial terms, how to address climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience of the built environment in the years and decades to come.

The charter outlines a series of actions to be taken by the following stakeholders: -

• FIDIC itself. • FIDIC member associations. • Project teams and schemes. • Companies. • Individual professional engineers.

As one of FIDIC’s core principles, sustainability is of course an important element of FIDIC’s 2020-2024 Strategic Plan. It is vital as an industry that we embed sustainability in our day-to-day delivery, lives and operations and, if done at sufficient scale, it should be possible to normalise. One of the key items for FIDIC was for it to begin its own journey on monitoring and reporting its own emissions. After all, you cannot change and adapt if you don’t know where you started from. Specifically, FIDIC has committed to “Annual reporting on implementation of its climate action plan including details of its Scope 1, 2 and selected Scope 3 emissions reductions from 2023 in line with its science-based approach and aspiring towards the ISO 14064-1 standard.”

We are happy to announce that having appointed an independent partner to work with FIDIC, we will publish in 2022 ahead of schedule our first scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. We did not, however, limit our ambition as we will not only be publishing our emissions for 2021 but also 2020 and 2019 to help understand the impact of the Covid pandemic and to help FIDIC to move forward and formulate its own carbon reduction plans.

This is the first time that FIDIC has been on such a journey and we are proud to have taken on this task. We will continue to improve the quality of our data and recording and monitoring of emissions going forward.

The achievement above will also mark another important milestone because, as FIDIC has been on this journey, it can now start to consider how it can help national member associations and even companies to take a similar journey. Watch this space.