A greying fellow reflects on... Sustainability
Part 4: Environmental sustainability, social benefits and green washing
George Bothamley FCInstCES
BEFORE chartered status was achieved, the CICES motto was a spreadeagle perched on a ranging rod with the motto ‘OMNIA METTEMUR QUAR VIDEMUS’. This loosely translates as ‘we measure all that we see’.
In the early days of this motto, measuring all that we see amounted to what we could see through a theodolite telescope or on a two-dimensional drawing.
Nowadays we can see the whole of the Earth’s surface in greater detail using GIS and drones, subsurface features using ground penetrating radar, and what the future may look like using technology such as digital twinning and 3D modelling.
Because we measure anything and everything connected with civil engineering projects and because civil engineering projects are by their nature connected with all aspects of sustainability, we civil engineering surveyors, both geospatial and commercial and of all specialisms, are well placed to measure all aspects of sustainability.
Evaluating
Evaluating life cycle costs is relatively straight forward. The input resources at every stage are ascertainable and an approximate unit cost can be assigned to them. Evaluating carbon effect is more difficult but can be simply done.
There is data to roughly assess the carbon impact at every stage – embedded carbon in material manufacture and transportation, in the construction phase, in maintenance and capital replacement during use, and in dismantling and final disposal.
There is data to roughly assess the carbon impact at every stage – embedded carbon in material manufacture and transportation, in the construction phase, in maintenance and capital replacement during use, and in dismantling and final disposal. A difficulty is in having a common metric for life cycle cost and carbon effect.
Is option B that has a £100,000 cost saving and 100t carbon reduction better than option C that has £50,000 cost saving but 150t carbon reduction?
Having a common metric of £ sterling for both solves this, and can be achieved by giving a tonne of carbon a monetary value. Perhaps the cost of carbon in offset trading can be used?
Alternatively, if the contract requires compliance with carbon reduction either through contract conditions or statutory regulation, an option may be excluded as non-compliant.
Other greenhouse gases are more difficult to assess, data and metrics for them being either more diverse or lacking. Environmental and social and governance benefits are even more difficult to assess. They tend to be easy to identify but difficult to measure.
Monetary value can be assigned to them, more easily for some than others.
But, apart from them being quite disparate and thus commonly having different metrics, a major difficulty in assessing and reporting them is that the economic benefit is far removed from the parties making the original decision.
An extreme example of this is the Grenfell cladding disaster. As well as making appalling moral and ethical decisions, only a few thousand pounds was saved by the cladding contractor at the expense of costing many millions of pounds to other parties. Stopping this sort of dreadful decision making needs government intervention by way of enforceable regulation. In the meantime, it is incumbent on us to make and report decisions and recommendations ethically.
The cost benefits of carbon reduction and sustainability measures tend not to be borne by the party making the decisions. For example, why should a house builder provide good insulation, renewable power generation, provision for active travel and public transport when it can make more profit without?
Government regulation, such as the aggregate and landfill taxes, is needed to encourage making sustainable decisions.
Economic viability
Some of the discussion in developing the CICES White Paper has surrounded whether environmental and social issues are separate from economic issues. I believe they are all connected; most decisions in civil engineering projects are driven by economic considerations. I therefore advocate representing all aspects in financial terms.
Presenting added value in nice to have non-financial terms may not lead to good decisions. I used to advocate when considering best value additions that they be described as best monetary value.
The cost benefits of carbon reduction and sustainability measures tend not to be borne by the party making the decisions.
This avoids introducing benefits that are nice to have but not economically viable Everything can be measured in monetary terms; it is just that some things are more difficult to value that stops it happening. Developing a simple calculator for sustainability and carbon effect as well as life-cycle costing will help achieve this consistently.
But economic viability is not always easily identified. An analogy that illustrates this is from the Teesside Construction Safety Forum that I attended from time to time in the 1990s. The HSE North East head of construction attended and used to counter delegates who railed at the cost of safety measures that the major construction companies with the best safety records also had the best profitability.
The same may well be true for sustainability. Whilst there may not yet be much-recorded evidence of this, it can do no harm to believe it in the meantime. It is very difficult at present to show the issues concisely because of the abundance of terms used for sustainability issues, and even more difficult to assign a monetary value to them. Social benefits are even more diverse, the UN recognising seventeen goals.
It is perhaps best to report the anticipated effects without attempting an assessment of monetary value. For example, a road improvement scheme may have an impact on public health, which could be measured by the cost to the economy of the ill health caused per individual times the number of people affected times the lifetime of the scheme. But this evaluation is likely to be speculative and easily exaggerated, which would be a form of greenwashing.
Greenwashing
Greenwashing is purporting to take sustainable actions that are exaggerated or even non-existent. A common illustration of this is fossil fuel companies having slick commercial ads extolling their green activity whilst more quietly continuing to develop unsustainable fossil fuel extraction on a large scale. Economically it ranges from macro actions by large institutions and corporations to micro-actions by individuals like us. Government does it.
Recent examples I have noticed:
- Government says Whitehaven coalmine will be carbon neutral (it won’t ).
- Government declines to publish highway construction cost-benefit and carbon effect reports (is this because they show both are negative?).
- Government overrides local planning authority refusal of housing development because it had no assessment of road traffic impact, no active travel or bus route provision and insufficient carbon reduction calculation (this appears to ignore legislation on achieving carbon reduction).
- We have laws on environmental sustainability that appear to be largely ignored (for example river and coastal water pollution). We have environmental protection laws that may disappear later this year (in the proposed bonfire of EU legislation).
For most of us all we can do is recognise it and call them out. Media reports tend to concentrate on the negative rather than positive aspects of environmental law. For example, reporting that the landfill tax encourages fly-tipping, but not reporting on the positive impact it has had on large-scale construction. Is this a form of greenwashing that needs calling out?
An example of macro action on green washing is carbon offsetting, where the claimed offset may not be realised or even attempted. It is difficult for me to see how promising to do something to reduce carbon effect in future years truly offsets the carbon effect you are producing now.
It seems like saying you will reduce pollution in watercourses by promising to reduce pollution in a watercourse at some future date whilst continuing to pollute another watercourse now.
An example of high-level greenwashing in economic terms is the International Cost Management Standard having a comprehensive calculator of sustainability benefits with nineteen cost groups split into thirty subgroups and six-lifetime categories, but which ignores emissions prior to acquisition of the project. This is surely a demonstration of G Raftery’s assertion that in construction budgeting, judgements need to be made between being roughly right or precisely wrong1.
Standards
Optimism bias can unwittingly result in low-level greenwashing. We have reflected on how common perceptions on using off-site fabrication of precast concrete and other modular construction, using less concrete and cement, whilst often resulting in increased sustainability, are not always the best solution.
The same is true for standardisation of components. Although this will generally result in significant economic and sustainable outcomes this will only be the case where the standard is the best current practice. To avoid standards being outdated and less sustainable than they might be constant review and refreshing is needed.
It seems like saying you will reduce pollution in watercourses by promising to reduce pollution in a watercourse at some future date whilst continuing to pollute another watercourse now.
When I worked on railway refurbishment at the turn of the century, I was impressed with Network Rail’s standard solutions, where any reconstruction had to follow the current standard unless impossible. I was particularly impressed with their painting specification, where application for new standards was encouraged; a proposal for a particular location and life span might get approval after testing but in a different category to that applied for.
The result was a wide range of modern paint specifications to choose from. No doubt Network Rail’s suite of standard specifications will have improved over the years since.
Soon after this observation the water framework I was working on sought to improve standardisation. For a later framework tender we proposed having a suite of standard designs which would be refreshed by incorporating modifications reported by as-constructed records.
The design time saved from doing individual designs would be partly redirected to seeking innovations to further improve the standards. Unfortunately, the tender was unsuccessful, so we were unable to implement our plans. Perhaps other people have or will take this up.
At project level greenwashing can occur by exaggerated reporting and gaming the system. If the contract requires sustainability targets to be met, such as by using NEC4 clause X29, there is the temptation to maximise performance. In the past reporting on KPIs has been known to exaggerate the outcomes and even game the system to show false good performance.
The same can easily become true for sustainability reporting. We should seek to avoid this in reporting sustainability and only report what can be factually demonstrated.
George Bothamley FCInstCES
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1 Risk Analysis in Project Management, J Raftery, 1993