Towards net-zero in New Zealand

Moata Carbon Portal is helping our clients measure, manage and ultimately drive down their carbon emissions.

In 2019, New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to make a legally binding commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. And in 2021, the government set the public sector, including public utility providers, an even stricter deadline: to become carbon neutral by 2025. The country must urgently understand, quantify and cut its carbon emissions, and plan how to compensate for remaining emissions through carbon sequestration and offsetting.

It’s quite a mind shift – to start quantifying carbon and then to change behaviours in a way that will drive down emissions.

Jonny Breen

Principal carbon consultant

We have partnered with Local Government New Zealand, an agency that represents the country’s councils, and are supporting Auckland Council and utility providers Watercare and Transpower, to assess carbon arising from construction, repair and maintenance (capital carbon), and asset operation (operational carbon). We’re helping them slash carbon from new projects. And we’re providing the information needed to plot reduction pathways.

Our digital solution, Moata Carbon Portal, is at the centre of these activities. Digital solutions combine skills in data science with ‘domain’ expertise – deep sector knowledge in water, energy, transport and the built environment.

Sharing asset data for wider benefits

All the assets our team has built for Auckland Council, Watercare and Transpower are freely shared with other councils and utilities across New Zealand. It is hoped that decarbonisation can be accelerated by making it easy for organisations to share information, showing by example the advantages of doing so, and promoting collaboration.

“If one council or agency spends the time and money to understand carbon and aid their decarbonisation efforts, New Zealand’s public sector as a whole should benefit from it,” says Jonny Breen, principal carbon consultant, Mott MacDonald.

“There’s a collaborative spirit,” he adds. “We’re working with organisations that want to achieve their own carbon targets as well as share how they achieved these benefits.”

Modelling emissions with Moata Carbon Portal

Our digital twin platform is helping New Zealand to drive down capital and operational carbon.

While digital models of infrastructure have existed for some time, digital twins go one step further as they are connected to the physical assets they represent, with data flowing in to provide new insight and understanding, and actionable information flowing out.

There is constant interaction between the digital twin and the physical twin

The promise of digital twins is better decisions. Digital twins have applications including real-time command and control of live operations, status and condition monitoring, investment support – and carbon management.

Moata is Mott MacDonald’s digital platform, hosting a growing range of solutions that bring together the data-crunching and visualisation power provided by digitalisation with the technical or ‘domain’ expertise of engineers and environmentalists, construction economists and cost analysts, and project and programme managers.

The word Moata is Māori, meaning ‘to be ready’. It’s fitting to see Moata Carbon Portal growing in Aotearoa, where ‘moata’ originates.

Ruatara Paapu

Moata software lead

The Moata range includes Carbon Portal, the built environment industry’s first BIM-enabled carbon calculator. Moata Carbon Portal incorporates the world’s most comprehensive data on infrastructure carbon emissions – continually updated as new emissions factors are published and taking account of local market variations. Data supplied by the New Zealand government, materials and products suppliers, and contractors has been used for modelling New Zealand projects and programmes.

Users can assess capital and operational carbon emissions for proposed new assets during the early optioneering phase, when the design is most flexible. It encourages design teams to ask fundamental questions:

• Is a no-build solution possible?
• What’s the least that can be built?
• Can carbon savings be made through design innovation and by using modern methods of construction?
• Are less carbon-intensive materials usable?
• What savings can be achieved by using lean principles – and through careful commissioning and integration?
• What further operational savings are possible?

Mount Hikurangi, Gisborne, New Zealand: the first place to see the sun

The impacts of each option and design change can be measured and compared. At the beginning of the process, Moata Carbon Portal encourages users to take a view of the systems into which a new asset will be integrated. No-build solutions might be possible by modifying existing assets, or by tackling user behaviours. And it focuses on asset lifecycles – capital and operational carbon combined (also referred to as ‘total carbon’).

Moata Carbon Portal is used with diverse stakeholders, from citizens to industry carbon experts and everyone in between. To span the range of interests and information needs, different toolkits and dashboards are developed. Moata Carbon Portal will continue to evolve as more organisations use it to make day-to-day decisions for their capital programmes and communicate with their stakeholders.

Establishing Watercare’s carbon baseline sets the stage for the water sector

Identifying carbon hotspots has helped Auckland’s water network operator, Watercare, and its supply chain to understand their carbon emissions and where to focus decarbonisation efforts.

Water and wastewater treatment works are significant users of energy

Over five years we helped Watercare establish a comprehensive carbon baseline based on business-as-usual construction practices in New Zealand. Many of the projects – ranging from treatment works to pipelines – were in early planning stages with minimal information, requiring close collaboration with Watercare project managers to fully understand and accurately scope each project.

“You have to make a lot of big assumptions and make allowances for future, unplanned items,” says Jonny Breen, principal carbon consultant at Mott MacDonald. However, Jonny and colleagues were able to build on carbon models already created in the UK for utility company Anglian Water. These were adapted, taking account of different carbon emissions factors for New Zealand, to provide an advanced starting point for Watercare projects.

Moata Carbon Portal is linked with building information modelling (BIM). Over the last decade we have built a huge library of BIM assets – a virtual warehouse of components and assemblages – all of which are tagged with carbon data. Every Watercare project was first broken down into assets that could be matched with those in our BIM library. Updated with New Zealand carbon data, the BIM models gave instant figures for total carbon.

Our Watercare team set up workshops with the team responsible for Anglian Water’s carbon models. “One of the key pieces of this work was knowledge transfer,” Jonny explains.

The link between BIM design software and Moata Carbon Portal allowed Watercare and its designers and contractors to explore multiple construction and operational scenarios and see the carbon implications as design changes were made. With a clear understanding of the programme’s carbon footprint, Watercare can use the information to start making reductions through project requirements, innovative design and efficient construction.

20% cost savings Watercare is aiming for in tandem with cuts to capital carbon emissions

Benefits to the wider sector

All of the information compiled during the carbon baselining project has been made publicly available to all New Zealand agencies responsible for water infrastructure. Wellington Water has since engaged Mott MacDonald to establish its carbon baseline and will be able to work off the hundreds of thousands of carbon assets already available in Moata Carbon Portal.

Building on Watercare’s carbon data and asset models will enable Wellington to make a faster start on its decarbonisation journey. As Jonny says: “We’ll be able to accelerate Wellington Water’s understanding of carbon, speeding up climate change mitigation through information sharing.”

The water sector in New Zealand is on a decarbonisation journey

Auckland’s carbon dashboard drives digital innovation

We partnered with Auckland Council to develop an innovative dashboard using Moata Carbon Portal to empower residents as the body begins its decarbonisation journey.

Auckland is predicted to see a 43% population increase by 2048

Auckland is committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, yet it has also increased its construction budget for 2021-31 by 21%, compared with 2011-21. The construction splurge is in preparation for a predicted 43% population increase by 2048, to replace aged infrastructure, and to stimulate recovery from the economic downturn caused by Covid-19. Yet construction is responsible for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions.

Using Moata Carbon Portal, Auckland Council wanted not just to decouple construction from carbon emissions, but to keep residents informed about decarbonisation efforts. Our team engaged businesses and residents through surveys and targeted workshops. These confirmed residents’ strong interest in how the council reduces its carbon emissions, with more than three quarters of people surveyed requesting ‘a meaningful tool’ to show information presented in a ‘localised, personal’ way.

In response, we formed a collaborative partnership with Auckland Council to create a digital toolkit using Moata Carbon Portal to measure, manage and mitigate carbon emitted by Auckland’s stormwater infrastructure through three functions:

• Calculator – identifying low-carbon options in infrastructure
• Dashboard – empowering decisionmakers to understand carbon
• Platform – empowering residents to explore the city’s carbon emissions

Digital insights are helping to decouple construction from carbon emissions

Powered by Moata, the toolkit is refreshed whenever carbon data is updated. It is interactive, allowing users to examine the city’s infrastructure carbon footprint and compare the capital and operational emissions of different projects. “We need greater innovation if we are to meet our carbon reduction goals,” says Auckland Mayor Phil Goff. Enabling people to understand the sources and scale of carbon emissions is essential, showing citizens, businesses, developers and the construction value chain where to focus innovation for greatest impact. Mayor Goff hopes that “this tool will help us achieve our infrastructure goals as well as our emissions reduction targets.”

The potential for carbon capture

Major emissions reductions are possible, but carbon cannot be cut to absolute zero. Therefore substantial remaining emissions will need to be offset – a requirement highlighted by the toolkit. Auckland has an abundance of parks, lakes, wetlands and beaches, providing great sequestration potential. In addition to locking away carbon, using these areas for sequestration will enhance biodiversity, air and water quality.

There are also opportunities to use unproductive coastal farmland for carbon sequestration, allowing it to revert to nature, gathering carbon into soils and vegetation in the process.

In partnership with leaders of the first nation Māori community, the team included mauri (lifeforce) alongside carbon as a key metric, measured and assessed using the toolkit, and used to inform infrastructure design and decision-making. The project was shortlisted in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Mayoral Challenge in June 2021. “The toolkit we’ve developed with Auckland Council and the way it’s being used is leading the way for New Zealand and the rest of the world. The plan is to scale and share it across the country,” Jonny Breen says.

A carbon baseline to benefit the entire energy sector

Transpower is leading the decarbonisation of New Zealand’s energy industry. With several capital projects in planning, establishing a carbon baseline is crucial to inform design and decision-making.

A carbon baseline was an important step for the energy industry in New Zealand

Transpower is the publicly owned energy network that connects the electricity distribution boards (EDBs) in cities across New Zealand. The utility has committed to a 60% reduction in its Scope 3 emissions – those associated with purchased goods and services, including construction and supply chain activities.

We used Moata Carbon Portal to establish the carbon baseline for two projects to help Transpower understand its emissions. The first was for an overhead line during its feasibility stage, with three different proposals to consider. The second was a substation nearing completion.

At feasibility stage there is still considerable room for manoeuvre in shaping the design. The first project allowed carbon to be considered alongside other criteria, resulting in large emissions reductions. There was limited scope for carbon savings on the second project but carrying out a detailed carbon audit provided a new baseline against which future Transpower projects can be measured. “We now have really accurate values which we will apply to other substation carbon models,” Jonny Breen says.

Transpower has engaged us to continue using Moata Carbon Portal for its major projects.

We now have really accurate values which we will apply to other substation carbon models.

Jonny Breen

Principal carbon consultant