The construction industry exists to give humanity an environment in which to thrive, and there is no doubt that we have risen to that challenge. Unfortunately, typically there is no action without consequence and what is abundantly clear is that in pursuit of our goal the buildings and infrastructure that we have delivered have had a significant impact on our natural environment.

This needs to be addressed, otherwise the advances we have made will soon be reversed.

Luckily, it’s not all doom and gloom. We’ve seen recently that when faced by a common threat, governments, businesses, and societies can work together to address monumental issues at pace.

The challenge now is to use that same focus and vigour to deliver a more sustainable environment for us all.

It will require us to think differently, and no singular organisation or individual will solve the challenges we face alone, which is one of the reasons we became members of the UK Business Council for Sustainable Development. Real positive action will be achieved by collective momentum; working together will make what at times seems like an insurmountable task, less daunting.

Time and time again it has been proven that, when you are trying to do things differently, collaboration makes sure that the change sticks.

So how do we get buy-in to the task at hand? Understand the scale of change? Know where to start? And how do we know if what we are doing is actually working?

A silver bullet does not exist (yet), but the effective collection and use of our data will play a key role in understanding and driving sustainability performance.

Effective mechanisms for collecting and using sustainability performance data enable organisations and developments to set robust sustainability goals, track performance and embed continuous improvement.

There is, rightly, increasing scrutiny of sustainability claims from both a legislative and societal perspective, which makes data transparency vital.

According to the UK Green Building Council, the built environment sector accounts for 25% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions. From forensic analysis of our own carbon emissions, the majority (96%) is associated with the materials we use on our projects.

Whilst this will not come as a surprise, to see this quantified highlights that no single organisation can achieve targets such as decarbonisation alone. The industry will have to come together to address the sustainability challenges we face and use the data to drive focussed and sustained effort.

Our existing operating models will need to change, and the competitive nature of the construction industry does present challenges in embedding sustainability into day-to-day delivery. We are not united in our focus: clients have differing sustainability aspirations and demands on their contractors. Each contractor has a different sustainability strategy, and targets placed upon its supply chains. And those supply chains have their own demands to meet.

At each point there is an abundance of data being collected, but with slight variances and mechanisms of collection. It could be argued that we are data rich – however the use of this data, often for a single purpose, largely remains an untapped resource.

At Sir Robert McAlpine, both sustainability and data analytics are key to our development and innovation. We participate in activities that foster collaboration in construction and beyond.

Our involvement in the project data analytics community and in establishing the first Construction Data Trust (CDT) demonstrates its importance to us. The CDT is a cross industry initiative to pool data from multiple construction and infrastructure projects and use AI to drive improvements – in productivity, sustainability, health and safety, and more – for the benefit of the industry and society.

This work has already delivered previously unrealised insights into our operations, but we have only begun to scratch the surface.

At Sir Robert McAlpine we are “Proudly Building Britain’s Future Heritage”. We are doing this together with our people, clients, peers, and wider supply chain partners. Going beyond net zero and truly embedding sustainability into our planning, procurement and delivery of a built environment which will allow humanity and nature to thrive needs collective, open, and transparent action.

If more organisations come together and are joined up and open about their sustainability performance and data, greater strides can be made in realising our sustainability goals.

Author: Simon Richards, Sustainability Director at Robert McAlpine, members of the UK Business Council for Sustainable Development