Crunch decision

Pursuing sustainability offers opportunities to accelerate out of recession and reduce exposure to the conditions behind the current crunch, argues Paul Ashley of Mott Macdonald

There is a danger that while we’re all in the grips of the global economic crunch sustainability may be seen as ‘nice to have’ rather than as essential and get pushed to one side. It should in fact be treated as a keystone for strengthening the development and construction sectors, seeing them through the economic crisis and putting them in good shape to respond to future economic growth.

It is worth re-stating that sustainability has many strands. It is commonly summarised as the balancing of social, economic and environmental needs across the generations – harnessing natural and human resources to achieve economic growth while ensuring that resources are not squandered, that natural systems are allowed to regenerate and that advantage to one social group is not to the detriment of another.

In a resource constrained world with a growing and – despite the present recession – increasingly affluent population, reconciling demands for improved standards of living with the environmental limits of our planet is perhaps the crunch issue. We can have a major influence on the performance of our built environment through the way we design, procure and construct projects.

Embedding sustainability
Achieving meaningful improvements in the sustainability of our built environment involves a combination of behavioural and procedural change.

At Mott MacDonald, we have for many years seen sustainability as part and parcel of providing good, efficient engineering solutions and as inseparable from our wider corporate duty to act responsibly. But we recognise that we need to embed sustainability even more fundamentally in what we do. We have recently launched a ‘hearts and minds’ carbon action campaign which encourages all members of staff to think about the carbon and resource use impacts of their actions at work and at home. Embedding carbon and resource use consciousness in everyday activities, we believe, will further promote the sustainability of the solutions we offer.

Our cultural emphasis on sustainability is supported by constantly evolving procedures for quality, environmental and safety assurance. Like many in the industry Mott MacDonald has attained ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 – the international standards for quality and environmental management – but our own project-specific assurance system takes account of wider drivers. The aim is to assure throughout a project’s development that the impacts of decisions taken have been considered, with proper risk management strategies deployed, potential harm mitigated and benefits maximised.

And for our customers we have also evolved guidelines enabling a strategic and systematic approach to promoting sustainability. For the government of Hong Kong we are developing a method to assess the impacts of different options during development, delivery, operation and eventual decommissioning of infrastructure projects. This is believed to be the first civil engineering-specific guidance in the world. We have also developed the first building sustainability guidelines specifically tailored to the needs of the Middle East, addressing shortcomings encountered when translating the US LEED and UK BREEAM sustainability performance measures to the Gulf region.

Working with the supply chain and stakeholders
Promoting sustainability involves changing the way the industry works as well as thinks. Through the choice of people they employ and the way they use them, client, consultant, contractor and supplier organisations dramatically influence the whole-life performance of buildings, infrastructure and urban environments.

Collaborative working between like-minded organisations with common goals and an integrated approach to design and construction can achieve major materials, energy and water efficiencies and reductions in carbon and waste. Use of off-site prefabrication, lean construction and IT in the design-supply-construction interface not only offer opportunity for improved environmental performance, but help deliver improved quality, greater predictability and control over time and cost risks, and help create new supply chains.

Cross-industry collaboration and engagement with all stakeholders in the planning process are also essential to producing sustainable urban communities that rely less on private transport and create closer links between domestic, leisure, retail and work environments. And they can help produce buildings, facilities and infrastructure designed for ease of reuse and eventual decommissioning. By thinking about the nature of materials as well as quantities, we can actually promote materials reclamation, recycling and reuse.

The long term view
Taking a whole life view of project performance can help offset the higher capital cost sometimes associated with projects delivering high levels of environmental performance. With a number of clients we are weighing capital expenditure against operational costs, embodied carbon and carbon arising from operation and maintenance.

If the industry can hold its nerve, working together to overcome the natural inertia and conservatism that bites during hard times, and push forward sustainability through design and construction, we should see swift dividends. Prices will fall as today’s leading edge technologies and methods become better established and move into the mainstream.
Of course, regulatory and market factors have a major bearing on the attractiveness and viability of different solutions, as do customer and stakeholder attitudes and behaviour. Around the world, governments provide different combinations of carrots and sticks to penalise short term harmful behaviour and promote whole-life improvements in performance. This is an evolving landscape.

Meanwhile, understanding customer and stakeholder’s desires and needs, and encouraging participation in the evolution of a project can promote their buy-in to more sustainable solutions. The equation between capital cost, cost in use and user benefit is changing, with a significant shift towards user benefit. In a shrinking or static market, quick wins are harder to find, and so customers are more discerning about longer term value.

Energy efficiency, good access to public transport and the quality of the internal and external environments will all help commercial property owners and residential developers to clinch deals and maximise yield value.

Economic slump could actually drive significant improvement in quality right across the built environment, as owners of older buildings, for example, try to close the gap on high spec new builds with thoughtfully designed and procured refits.

Local solutions
People have been seeking ways to enhance the health and vitality of urban environments for centuries, but today’s sustainability agenda provides new focus. The international nature of the economic downturn serves to emphasise the global nature of our world, with its interconnected webs of production, distribution and consumption. Globalisation has undoubtedly provided enrichment – socially, culturally and intellectually as well as economically – to many around the world. But it has also heightened the vulnerability of groups to oversupply or contractions in particular regions or markets.

Today’s crunch offers the opportunity to reassess our models for development and reorganise our built environment so that they become more self-sufficient and resilient.

Promoting industry and enterprise at a community level may help achieve better balance between supply and demand, promoting more sustainable employment. It would certainly reduce the requirement for transport of people and goods, with their associated environmental, social and economic costs. In turn, you may see a reduction in embodied energy across a range of commodities – certainly the idea of sourcing materials locally would promote reuse and recycling in the construction industry.

What may be lost in economies of scale could well be compensated for by the improvement in the overall sustainability of our communities and our habitat.

Within our own organisation we have been careful to ensure that our business is diverse by geography and discipline, helping protect us as a whole from the downturn. Our breadth and reach mean that we have a global presence, with locally staffed offices in over 40 countries. This in turn gives us the ability to provide truly local solutions. Through a number of locally and internationally significant projects we are helping to shape communities that, we hope, will set standards across all strands of the sustainability agenda.

We look forward to working with others in our industry to turn the present economic hiatus into an opportunity for shaping a better future.

For more information:
Paul Ashley is Mott MacDonald Group sustainability champion: paul.ashley@mottmac.com