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Collaborative focus on resource use alongside net zero is vital

Quick take

There is a need for the sector to focus on resource efficiency and nature alongside net zero.

The construction industry faces challenges due to its fragmented nature, with various stakeholders constrained by different factors, making cross-industry collaboration essential.

The Net-Zero Infrastructure Industry Coalition (NZIIC) has been working for the past five years to bring the sector together and provide guidance on tackling these challenges.

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While government has a role in setting out policies to enable the construction industry to deliver, it is down to the industry to deal with the how of delivery, not the government. The role of government is to set strategy and enact new regulation, which is an important tool in aiding change, but we as the construction industry must make it happen.

In working out the how of delivery, the challenge remains that engineers will tell you they are constrained by what the client wants, and the clients are constrained by the financing institutions and debt providers. The contractors will tell you that they’re constrained by the designs created by the engineering designer. The manufacturers of the materials – where some of the real difficulties on achieving net zero lie – will tell you that they are constrained by the regulations and what the client, designer and contractor want. And so it goes on down the supply chain and across the whole construction ecosystem.

We operate in a highly fragmented industry, so no one organisation has total control or influence, which is why cross-industry collaboration is more important than ever before.

For the last five years the Net-Zero Infrastructure Industry Coalition (NZIIC) has been bringing the sector together to find solutions and offer the sector clear guidance on how to tackle the challenges we face.

While we believe we have made a real difference over the last five years, there is much work to be done in the next five and we – like the rest of the industry – must focus on issues like resource efficiency and nature alongside net zero.

The NZIIC was founded in 2019 when the UK government committed to net zero by 2050, moving the challenge on from the previous 80% commitment. This change followed on from the government thinking about the what and the why and led to the need for us as an industry to think hard about the how, which is what the NZIIC set out to do.

From its launch involving Mott MacDonald, Pinsent Masons, Skanska, Transport for London, Anglian Water, UKCRIC and the UK Green Building Council, there are now 14 organisations working within the coalition.

As an industry, we’ve become fixated on carbon but not on resource use – and that needs to be addressed by the NZIIC and the wider sector over the next five years. However, the challenge is broader than just the UK - 50% of the world’s extractives go into new construction and with urbanisation growing globally, tackling this level of resource use worldwide will be critical. We need to get to the point where 90% of construction materials are reused.

This will call for a rapid change in business models to create a circular construction economy with buildings and infrastructure fully designed for ease of deconstruction and reuse. There is also an opportunity to think about how we can, not only figure out better ways of constructing things that use or produce less carbon, but also do so in a way that reduces the cost of infrastructure and the time to deliver it.

Not building new infrastructure is not an option either. The enormous challenge of delivering on infrastructure decarbonisation, for example the decarbonisation of electricity generation by 2030, will involve a very large amount of construction. First there is the industry’s capacity to deliver on this that needs to be addressed but we must also consider how we are going to deliver this volume of work in a low carbon way. This will challenge our ability to innovate at scale.

What this all needs is collaboration across the industry and the beauty of the NZIIC is that it brings together public sector organisations, firms throughout the infrastructure industry supply chain, as well as academics and some parts of government. This mix allows a rich exchange of thinking and sharing of ideas to try and work out what the best answers could be.

The guides and report produced by the NZIIC so far bring together expertise from the UK but the knowledge they create can be used worldwide. The aim is for future work to have the same exportable benefits as we consider the broader challenges that need to be addressed but to do that effectively, what the NZIIC needs is you.

It is only by coming together that we can overcome the industry’s fragmentation and addressing the linked challenges of meeting net zero, improving resource efficiency and valuing nature in everything we do.

While the NZIIC has work in progress on practical guides on implementing systems thinking and equipping the whole industry to evaluate and manage Scope 3 emissions, we need more organisations to work with us on the challenge around resources and low carbon materials.