Climate change and sustainability

Our carbon specialists work with sector experts worldwide to:

• Influence policy, governance and decision making, providing technical policy and planning advice to support regulation and guidelines for sustainable infrastructure development; and strategic wayfinding to join up solutions with a systems approach spanning renewable energy, storage and efficiency, nature-based solutions, behavioural and operational change, and new technologies.
• Support carbon management and accounting including baseline measurement of emissions for organisations, programmes and projects; identifying emissions hotspots; and applying industry best practice for ongoing measurement and consistent transparent reporting in line with international standards.
• Develop decarbonisation roadmaps towards reducing direct and indirect emissions, account for your entire asset base, operations and supply chains, and profile varying scenarios and synergies with other organisations and systems.
• Help implement and support PAS 2080 including the practical measures set in the specification across your operations, assets and value chain.
• Embed carbon reduction principles across the value chain by engaging with stakeholders, identifying, assessing and implementing reduction opportunities, and tracking progress.
• Support project delivery, waste reduction and efficiency improvements including planning and designing projects with reduced emissions through lower carbon asset repurposing, energy supply, materials and methods; energy and resource efficiencies and reviewing whole-life carbon; and by using digital tools, BIM and design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA).
• Improve and adapt assets and their operation and maintenance by turning data into information to inform better decisions and by upgrading existing assets – given the most sustainable assets are those that can be improved for future needs.
• Build capability, helping you focus on organisational structures, leadership, culture, communication, development and investment in tools; and engaging and incentivising your suppliers to decarbonise and share low carbon innovation.

From single assets to your wider portfolios, networks and systems, we help infrastructure owners, operators and investors to realise the value of investing in climate resilience through: 

• Strategic risk assessment and reporting, enabling companies to meet mandatory climate related disclosures (such as those required by the Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures) with the right systems, processes and capabilities. That includes capacity and governance for resilience and its adoption into risk registers. We power your stakeholder engagement, providing measurement and effectiveness monitoring on risk exposure and mitigation, and advise on implementation of adaptation plans.
• Interpreting climatic and natural hazard modelling, accessing and applying climate science and meteorological data to examine your climate change risks. This includes modelling of climate hazard impacts (like drought or floods) on infrastructure, processes, environments and communities; and assessing your exposure to physical impacts by collecting and cross-referencing with data about your assets, operations and revenues.
• Embedding climate change risks and resilience in projects, working alongside our multidisciplinary design and domain expertise to identify and integrate risk from the earliest stages, to deliver the best possible outcomes. We build resilience into asset management and financial planning, aligning investments with maintenance, repair, replacement and improvement cycles. Alongside this, we support project management and track the impacts of resilience interventions for asset performance and whole-life costs.
• Developing industry-leading business cases for resilience, leveraging our experience developing the Physical Climate Risk Assessment Methodology (PCRAM), a recognised first-of-a-kind open-source method using real-world case studies to improve risk assessment consistency and quantification of the costs and benefits of resilience measures. Our multidisciplinary experts can identify, cost and design the resilience interventions your asset requires and analyse the performance implications, then go on to support procurement, supervise construction and monitor performance.
• Providing advice and insight on interconnected systems, enabling you to understand how other factors influence the resilience and adaptation of your projects, programmes and organisation.

Our experts work with governments, development partners, asset owners and operators and investors to:

• Shape evidence-based policies and strategies for delivering climate ambition, aligning your policies and strategies with decarbonisation and adaptation objectives, and leveraging climate data to inform your decision making, including targeting of vulnerable areas and communities.
• Strengthen the enabling environment for climate action, developing business cases for private sector engagement, and leveraging opportunities and incentives for greater cooperation across all levels of government and for inclusion of vulnerable communities in decision making.
• Build organisational and institutional skills and capabilities, assessing institutional capacity gaps and taking a patient and incremental approach to capacity building. This includes identifying and applying options for institutionalising knowledge, such as secondments, the creation of communities of practices and the use of digital solutions.
• Provide technical advice for access to climate finance by sharing knowledge about the climate finance ecosystem, investor expectations and investment opportunities in priority sectors and technologies, and by supporting the origination and design of projects able to attract climate finance.
• Implement climate solutions such as renewable energy, climate smart agriculture, sea defence strengthening, coastal engineering, catchment management and restoration of ecosystems.