The Green Construction Board – the industry-government body charged with guiding construction to its 2025 and 2050 carbon reduction targets – has launched a study aimed at giving the industry better access to the sustainability data it needs.
The pledge was one of the undertakings in its Two Years On report, which was published to coincide with a half-day conference held yesterday (10 February).
The conference heard progress reports from the GCB’s six working groups: valuation and demand; infrastructure; buildings; greening the industry; knowledge and skills; and promotion.
The GCB was established in October 2011 and is co-chaired by government minister Michael Fallon and Skanska UK president Mike Putnam.
The GCB’s knowledge and skills working group, chaired by Willmott Dixon’s Rob Lambe, has commissioned a study to examine how data collected by the construction and property industries can be better used to influence change.
It will also look at why current data capture and dissemination is not being used to its full potential, and will aim to make information more readily usable and available, particularly at project and company level.
The study is to be undertaken by the Sustainable Development Foundation, and is due to be completed in mid-2014.
Lambe told CM:"There’s a general view that there’s a lot of data that isn’t in a state people can use. We want to establish if that’s the case, and how we can make sure data can influence outcomes in the built environment."
The SDF project will concentrate on data surrounding energy, carbon and water in operational use, but Lambe says that the conclusions drawn will be applied to other areas of data collection, such as waste.
Meanwhile, the “greening the industry” working group said that its “deliverables in 2014 will include final analysis of the work to achieve the 2008-12 industry targets and a conference mid-year to discuss and disseminate the findings and learning to a wider audience”.
The 2008-12 industry targets, set following the 2008 Strategy for Sustainable Construction, include, a target of reducing carbon emissions linked to site operations and transport by 15% from 2008 levels by 2012.
Meanwhile, the buildings group – chaired the UK Green Building Council chief executive Paul King – said that in 2014 it would continue its work to “close the performance gap” in non-domestic buildings.
The group also said it would revisit a shelved plan to establish an “Existing Buildings Hub” to emulate the success of the Zero Carbon Hub in overcoming barriers to zero carbon homes.
Lambe commented:"The Zero Carbon Hub dealt only with new homes and was quite focused in scope, so it would be hard to translate what it did across to the domestic and non-domestic existing building stock. But there does to be agreement that we need some kind of collection of indivuduals to channel all the research and information."
A year ago, the GCB published the Low Carbon Route Map for the Built Environment, a guide for the industry on the policies and actions necessary to achieve an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the built environment versus 1990 levels by 2050.
