In a new report, the Net Zero Infrastructure Industry Coalition (NZIIC), of which Pinsent Masons, the law firm is a member, said that knowledge of the level of carbon emissions produced by UK infrastructure is incomplete at the moment “because of a shortage of publicly available data”. It also identified a lack of a consistent method across the infrastructure sector for measuring projects’ carbon impact, and said that this leads to “unreliable assessment and forecasting capability” and ultimately could undermine the setting of the UK’s carbon budget and sector-specific targets for reducing emissions.
The NZIIC said access to good carbon data “is essential in understanding how to plan, design, deliver, and operate infrastructure”.
“Without understanding carbon within a project it is not possible to assess climate impact, and furthermore, we cannot understand the cumulative impact of all projects,” the coalition said in its report, ‘Is our carbon wallet empty? The embodied carbon of the national infrastructure pipeline’.
“This project has found significant issues with data availability, quality, and transparency across sectors that needs remedying from both top-down and bottom-up… You can’t manage and reduce what you can’t measure.”
Simon Colvin of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law, who specialises in contracts concerning the confluence of infrastructure and technology, said: “As ever the perennial challenge is not necessarily the collection of carbon-performance related data, but in its interpretation. As with other data rich assets they key is having standards and protocols for the recording and interpreting of the data. Only by collecting and reporting on data using a common language, standards and protocols will comparisons of emissions be meaningful and enable progress to net zero to be assessed at both project and sector levels.”
The NZIIC’s report set out a series of recommendations aimed at delivering “urgent support and guidance, from the top-down and from the bottom-up” to address the data shortfall.
Included within the recommendations was a call for industry to standardise how carbon emission factors across construction products and building materials are considered. The NZIIC also called for measurable targets towards ‘net zero’ to be set within the infrastructure sector, for owners of infrastructure assets to be responsible for preparing “carbon neutral outline designs … prior to planning and tender”, and for carbon data to be made available to ensure environmental impact assessments under the planning framework can be accurately completed.