‘On climate change, construction can be part of the solution’

Saul Humphrey’s message as he starts his CIOB presidential term is stark – but optimistic.

“Construction’s carbon footprint has been a big part of the climate problem,” he says, bluntly. “We’re partly responsible for the floods, the storms, the overheating, which are already changing how projects are designed, delivered and operated.

“But the industry also has an opportunity – to flip the paradigm and become part of the solution.”

Humphrey takes office at a time when the built environment is grappling with several major issues, which are reflected in CIOB’s corporate plan themes of quality and safety, environmental sustainability, and the skills gap.

“‘Modern professionalism’ is our guiding principle that links all those concepts together,” says Humphrey.

“On all these themes, and particularly environmental sustainability, we need to make sure our professional members have the knowledge and competency to address the challenges that are coming.”

Humphrey left school at 16 and joined regional contractor R G Carter as a YTS trainee, remaining with the business for 33 years before later taking a senior leadership role at Morgan Sindall Construction.

“In the early stages of my career, climate change and biodiversity loss were not on the agenda,” he says.

But over time, sustainability standards and environmental targets began to feature increasingly in his work.

“There were more and more projects coming through that required the Code for Sustainable Homes, BREEAM Excellent or Outstanding, or Passivhaus,” Humphrey says.

“I started spending more time with clients and people who were very aware of planetary boundaries, the sustainable development goals, the climate crisis we face and the built environment’s part in it.”

Projects Humphrey picks out include the University of East Anglia’s Enterprise Centre – at the time dubbed by the press as the UK’s greenest building – and the Passivhaus development of social housing in Goldsmith Street, Norwich that won the Stirling Prize.

He also points to former Greenpeace managing director Jonathan Smales, whose organisation Human Nature is helping deliver the Phoenix Project, a sustainable development on brownfield land in Lewes, East Sussex.

During Humphrey’s years in contracting, there were limits to how much control he had over the sustainability credentials of projects.

“Working for R G Carter and Morgan Sindall, I tended to have less influence on what we were building,” he says. “You could improve projects, make them more sustainable or more deliverable, but fundamentally the building had already been defined.”

That changed when he set up his own business and moved into consulting and client-side advisory work.

“You’re involved much earlier,” Humphrey says. “You help decide what goes on the building, who designs it and what standards it’s going to achieve. So there’s far more influence.”

That experience has helped shape his view that the industry needs to move away from lowest-cost thinking.

“I’m hugely persuaded by [Canadian prime minister] Mark Carney’s vision of values,” he says. “We shouldn’t be driving to the lowest cost, we should be looking for optimal value. A more resilient building, a higher-quality building, built with the right materials and to better standards, should last longer, be cared for better and ultimately be more sustainable.”

Humphrey argues those choices will increasingly bring commercial advantages for clients too.

“If you are a client that delivers buildings with reduced embodied carbon, that are net-zero-in-operation, then that will attract more staff, investors and occupiers, while also attracting a premium value and reducing the risk that you end up with stranded assets.

Humphrey believes construction is only beginning to understand how climate change will alter the conditions in which projects are delivered.

“For a long time, the focus has been on efficiency and delivery,” he says. “But we need to think about resilience and how what we build will perform in a more future that is likely to be more uncertain, and more exposed to environmental stress.

“Our carbon footprint is significant – we’ve often heard how the built environment accounts for around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions – so we have a duty to shape the built environment so it can stop making things worse and start making things better.

“We’re already seeing the impact of rising sea levels and coastal erosion, where we’ve resorted to managed ‘roll back’, where properties are being demolished and people are being moved inland.”

In his view, the industry still has relatively few examples of projects designed around long-term resilience.

What frustrates Humphrey, is that “many of the solutions we need already exist”.

“We know how to refurbish and retrofit buildings, rather than demolishing and building new, and creating more embodied carbon. It’s not always possible, but it’s good to see some clients doing that, though plenty are not.

“We know how to design buildings that use less energy. We understand more about materials and lifecycle performance. We’re doing more with sustainable drainage and bio-based or recycled materials. But we’re not yet doing it at the scale required.

“The barriers to these sustainable building solutions are often in procurement, finance, how risk is allocated and how evidence is used to support decisions.”

Humphrey’s sustainability views influence his decisions about projects he chooses to work on.

When pushed on more controversial issues, Humphrey says: “I personally wouldn’t be involved in airport expansion at the moment. I try not to fly, and I don’t fly for holidays because that is a choice I can avoid. We do not yet have genuinely sustainable aviation fuel at anything like the scale required.”

On nuclear energy, he takes a more pragmatic stance.

“Personally, I think nuclear power has a place if it’s done safely and properly,” he says. “Particularly when energy demand is increasing because of AI and data centres.”

Humphrey regards data centres as another sustainability dilemma.

“They require phenomenal amounts of energy and cooling,” he says. “Construction companies will be asked to build them and if they don’t, somebody else will.

“So the challenge becomes how to build them in the most sustainable way possible – recognising that only renewable energy is sustainable and that we face ever greater water constraints.

“But there’s still a tension there, because increasing consumption is difficult to reconcile with a world where we ultimately need to consume less.”

Humphrey is conscious that recent political discourse has made debates about climate change increasingly polarising. An active social media user – with over 33,000 LinkedIn followers – his posts have sometimes been the target of fossil-fuel trolls.

“There was a period around COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 where there was much greater consensus,” he says. “Now we’ve seen net zero become weaponised in some debates, and organisations with climate resilience strategies are having to think carefully about the language they use.”

Meanwhile, the underlying challenge is only intensifying, Humphrey says.

“Emissions are cumulative and still growing annually. The problem is worse now than when we discussed it in Copenhagen, Paris or Glasgow.

“We haven’t done enough to arrest emissions growth, and we’re running out of time.”

He recognises that environmental policies must avoid alienating people already struggling with economic pressures.

“The cost-of-living crisis is a much bigger and more urgent concern for many people today than carbon emissions,” Humphrey says. “So we have to demonstrate that the right environmental solutions are also affordable solutions.”

Similarly, he recognises that sustainability has to compete with other construction priorities.

“If we insist upon higher standards of embodied carbon reduction, introduce all the changes required after Grenfell through the Building Safety Act, ask for more affordable homes and more investment in skills all at the same time, we risk destroying economic viability,” Humphrey says.

“And if projects aren’t commercially viable, they won’t be built. So we must avoid unintended consequences. We need systems thinking and holistic ideas to find better solutions.”

And this is where construction has a great opportunity, Humphrey believes.

“The industry needs to appreciate the scale of future global urbanisation,” he says. “By 2050, the global population is expected to approach 10 billion, with an increasing proportion living in cities.

“Construction will have a huge role in shaping how people live, how resilient places become and how resources are used.”

As well as running his own consultancy, Humphrey is professor of sustainable construction management at Anglia Ruskin University. Education and the next generation are central to his outlook.

“Anything we can do to help embed that environmental learning and awareness earlier has to be a good thing,” he says.

“CIOB has its royal charter and a duty to society, but we shouldn’t just be thinking about today; this is about the planet our children will be living in tomorrow.”

Humphrey thinks the next generation of construction professionals will need not only technical expertise, but also a broader understanding of long-term environmental and social impacts.

“We can play a huge role in building a much more sustainable future – but only if our professionals have the awareness and competency to deliver it,” he says.

It’s a message that builds on the work undertaken by the past two CIOB presidents, Mike Kagioglou, who focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and Paul Gandy, with his emphasis on professionalism and competency.

“We can’t assume everybody understands what’s coming,” Humphrey adds. “We need to ensure that knowledge is current and correct. If our professionals are properly informed, then they will deliver better outcomes.”