ICE champions climate cause with carbon reduction recognition

With COP26 in Glasgow on the horizon later this year and several prominent public figures strengthening the call for societal change when it comes to the environment, the quest for net zero has rarely enjoyed such a healthy position in the spotlight. Rachel Skinner, President of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) tells Construction Worx about the ICE Carbon Champions initiative.

COP – the UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021 – is designed to bring stakeholders together to help accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Chief within the Paris Agreement was a commitment to achieving net zero by the middle of this century and, with less than three decades to go, talk must now give way to actions. Civil engineers represent one cohort with a key role to play and have been urged to carry the baton of carbon reduction by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) President Rachel Skinner.

Following her inaugural address in November 2020, in which she asked ICE’s 95,000-strong membership, and the wider engineering community, what they were going to do to help society reach net zero by 2050, Skinner’s Shaping Zero initiative has moved the discussion on at an impressive rate.

After an overwhelming reaction to her rallying call, Skinner and the Institution have gone on to launch the ICE Carbon Champions programme, which recognises projects actively reducing their carbon footprint. The programme takes in submissions from engineers globally, be they from projects big or small, who can prove a reduction in carbon. Only one member of the project team needs to be an ICE member, with an expert panel of judges assessing submissions.

Among the early entries was one of the first dynamically managed surface water management systems in the world, hailing from Glasgow. To accommodate and convey surface water runoff, the system is autonomously managed through weather forecasting, data monitoring and modelling, identifying extreme weather and proactively switching off canal feeders to lower water levels. Those behind the project estimate it has unlocked 110 hectares of land across the north of the city, helping reduce flood risk and allow for the development of more than 3,000 new homes.

Other entrants include a technology to transform industrial and hazardous waste into low-embodied-carbon minerals and the development of a carbon calculation tool to inform design decisionmaking so alternative options can be analysed to reduce emissions. As well as creating a community of carbon-focused industry experts to facilitate best practice and knowledge-sharing, submissions will be used to inform The Carbon Project, another of the Institution’s efforts to make net zero a reality. A pan-industry, collaborative project, designed to tackle some of the challenges in achieving net zero, it focuses on measuring carbon impacts, capability building in low carbon design and delivery and systems-level carbon reduction.

Late last year, one of the project’s early outputs saw Dr Jannik Giesekam, Research Fellow in Industrial Climate Policy at the School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, crunch the numbers on emissions from UK infrastructure over the last decade. He and his workstream members found that, while emissions fell by almost a quarter between 2010 and 2018, the rate of reduction needed to accelerate from 3% to 4.1% in order to achieve the net-zero target.

It was the first time such emissions data had been updated since the Government’s Infrastructure Carbon Review of 2013, with further pieces of work in the offing, including reports assessing the drivers and blockers around net zero plus the issue of data-driven decision-making in infrastructure ahead of COP26.

With direct action to reduce carbon now firmly on the mainstream agenda and progress achievable at individual, organisation and industry level, the Institution hope to see the early influx of entries grow into a groundswell of ICE Carbon Champions – all helping to shape zero.