2G: Carbon Management and Planning
ICMS3: A World First for Carbon Management in the Built Environment, Euan Ryan and Alan Muse (RICS)
“ICMS3 provides a professional toolkit to measure and consistently report on carbon, and influence design and construction decisions. While other aspects such as cost and safety continue to play a key factor, of equal importance is ensuring a greener future for the construction sector”.
Problem: The built environment is responsible for around 40% of global carbon emissions. While building less and making use of existing assets is key, there remains a need for new infrastructure to deliver improved social and economic outcomes. It is therefore crucial that sustainable practices are adopted.
Solution: Fundamental to enabling sustainable decisions is being able to measure and compare carbon in construction projects. RICS has worked with 49 globally prominent organisations to develop ICMS3 - a world first for cost and carbon management in construction, from concept to completion and beyond.
Benefits: ICMS3 enables the interoperability of data across the life cycle of projects, including design, cost, carbon and operations. This standardised and benchmarked data across markets and sectors will enable sustainably to be a key consideration in construction projects and enable a clear assessment of the trade-offs between cost and carbon.
The Role of Planning in Delivering Climate Change Goals, Dr. John Carnie (Urban Studies, University of Glasgow)
This review paper examines the UK and Scottish planning profession’s response to climate change and COP26. It analyses policy and legislative initiatives and planning's role in delivering COP26 goals. Local Planning Authorities throughout the UK are at the forefront of balancing competing demands of economic development, regeneration, protection of the environment and increasingly climate change targets and sustainability goals. Planners have generally embraced such opportunities to shift towards more sustainable urban planning practices and to raise ambitions for local action on the ground. The profession is at the cutting edge of decision making in relation to the climate emergency in terms of having statutory and policy responsibility for dealing with c.450,000 annual planning applications through c.400 planning authorities. Effective development and strategic plans have an equal complimentary role in focusing key solutions. The paper explores planning’s role in coordinating and delivering climate change targets and aspirations: from strategic policy documents such as NPF4, the Environment Bill and the NPPF to delivering targets on the ground such as reducing building emissions, locating affordable homes in sustainable locations and biodiversity goals. Initiatives from the 4 main Scottish cities are examined together with English urban areas. Recent contested developments are analysed highlighting the very chameleon like nature of sustainable development.