Project:
Enabling Whole Life Carbon in Design
Visualising carbon and cost hot spots during design decision making.
This project aims to support organisations to explore how they can deliver low whole life carbon and cost solutions. Aligned to PAS2080, it provides the detail on the processes, systems, behaviours and culture needed to be in place to ensure whole life carbon and cost information can be used by engineers and decision makers to enable sustainable solutions.
Project stats:
Number of partners:
Funding received:
Completion date:
August 2023
Context of the project
The water industry is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2030. This project will enable the water sector and its value chain to make informed decisions based on data insight and visualisations. Above all this project will guide the industry to move away from managing capital and operational carbon separately to cost and enable whole life carbon cost management and ensure that investment solutions are truly sustainable for customers, society, and the environment.
This project will build on the current PAS2080 carbon standard and its philosophy that reducing carbon reduces cost and support organisations by providing guidance on the framework, tools and processes required to transition to a true whole-life carbon cost management approach within investment programmes.
To go beyond existing best practice requires the visualisation of carbon and cost hotspots by integrating existing data models within the engineering platforms. This enables the engineering teams to challenge designs and optimise solutions in real time as they visualise the impacts made during early design.
What is whole life carbon?
What is PAS2080?
Updated in 2023, PAS2080 is a standard for managing whole life carbon in buildings and infrastructure and sets the standard across the globe.
The framework considers the whole value chain, aiming to reduce carbon and cost through more intelligent design, construction and operation.
PAS2080 also ensures carbon is consistently and transparently quantified at key points in infrastructure delivery which promotes data sharing along the value chain.
This project will deliver:
This project has provided the guidance, feedback and principles to enable those both inside and outside the water sector to understand how they can embed a whole life carbon approach within their own organisations. This project has investigated the art of the possible and provided the inspiration for businesses to take the first steps to looking at their own data, processes, frameworks and change programmes to embed a true whole life carbon approach.
An approach to measuring whole life carbon
Enabling the consideration of capital and operational carbon emissions together and facilitating optimisation of their relative and combined impacts during the design phase.
A data structure linking whole life carbon and cost that is reusable across the sector
Allowing the lifecycle carbon/cost impacts of investment decisions to be more easily considered.
A proof of concept, digital tool that will enables visual
carbon and cost hot spotting in BIM
This will provide the sector with an approach to developing digital visualisation tools, that identify carbon and cost hotspots; facilitating the further step change needed to reduce carbon and cost during the design phase of projects.
A set of industry specific principles for integrating carbon and cost into decision making processes
Which will ensure accountability, collaboration and sharing of lesson learnt to improve results and minimise whole life carbon.
A change framework to enable the required organisational and cultural changes
Which will enable the required organisational and cultural changes, build awareness and knowledge and support the long-term adoption of new ways of working.
A wealth of benefits
Information at the right time
Enhancing an existing carbon dataset will facilitate the consideration of capital and operational carbon emissions together and consider tradeoffs during the design phase.
Combined with a cost dataset, it will allow the carbon/cost impacts of maintenance, replacement and end of life to be considered.
Hot spots
Providing the industry with a proof of concept that identifies carbon and cost hotspots, will facilitate the further step change needed to reduce carbon and cost during the design phase.
Provides key building blocks in developing a ‘digital twin approach’ in the future. Inputting whole life carbon and cost will ensure it will be easier for the industry to undertake resilience and scenario planning against a range of climate forecasts (e.g. 2C and 4C warming projections), whilst immediately understanding the carbon and cost impacts and balancing these to ensure maximum societal benefits are delivered.
Standardisation
The project will provide a transparent and consistent assessment and reporting structure for the industry.
Visualisation
Being able to visualise whole life carbon/cost accounting will provide strong evidence to support investment in sustainable solutions that come from our supply chains.