Opinion piece by Dr Olli Jones, Associate Director Sustainability & Innovation, Cundall.

As the planet warms past 1.5 degrees for its 12^th consecutive month, murmurings of change appear to be afoot. A new government is welcome, to slowly begin restoring the flow of public sector projects and private sector confidence that many in our sector rely on. In the heady aftermath of landslide victories it is easy for new power to set out overpromising, only to eventually under deliver. But the initial moves appear comfortingly cautious, and a move to right some clear wrongs and begin restoring some order to the circus that had become the UKs political, economic, environmental and public health landscape. We remain to see if these efforts to clean house become truly progressive and world leading once again. But one thing has changed – the fraying of public patience that led to this landslide is now out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in. A stereotypically sedate UK population appears to have voiced its frustration. So what’s next – we expect action – we expect results – we expect the promised change. But we have to become the change as well.

I moved to Cundall 12 months ago this week. Because they had an impressive track record of being trail blazers and first adopters, but importantly they had the most ambitious climate commitments in our sector and they were not only delivering on these commitments but reshaping a global business to revolve around them. This week Cundall publicly announced a commitment to only deliver zero carbon design on all projects by 2030. Recognising the critical need for practical, science-led action to transition all buildings, infrastructure, and human settlements to net zero carbon as rapidly as possible. Twenty-five global offices will collaborate with clients and our peer networks of design, construction, property development, facilities management, and real estate investment stakeholders to design and deliver the low carbon solutions necessary to minimise the impact of global temperature rises.

This means that by the end of this decade, Cundall will only work on projects where they are delivering net zero carbon.  The Zero Carbon Design 2030 (ZCD2030) commitment is a line in the sand that has been two years in the making. It is both an internal cultural shift and a standpoint that will enable our engineers and designers to make zero carbon thinking ‘business as usual’ for all our people and clients.

As well as positively impacting culture, there has also been a clear commercial benefit to investing in reshaping a greener business. Because we have started to deliver on our commitments on projects, clients are coming to us with increasingly more ambitious and exciting projects – from helping to restructure and replan entire countries around long term sustainable development, mass infrastructure and new green cities – to the world’s largest renewable energy, aquaculture and sustainable data centre projects. The challenges we face as an industry to decarbonise are huge, but by setting a clear direction and intent – and taking it one step at a time we are making progress. What we need now is supportive, progressive government policy and industrial strategy to keep pace. So, we will have to help shape this, and we are through national and regional councils all over the world.

Our approach to policy making should not focus on investment in the green transition being seen as a burdensome or risky cost to the UK economy and local authorities. Rather, a realisation that investing in the green transition unlocks greater potential with more co-benefits to the UK. One of the main priorities of all new policy should be “what contribution is this making to developing sustainable public finances”. Ultimately how are we promoting economic growth, reducing national debt and helping the UK economy and environment to adapt and become more resilient. We can address spiralling public health costs, the costs associated with addressing frequent climatic events as well as the costs associated with energy and the poor maintenance of our privatised crumbling water and energy infrastructure. Our programmes of education at all levels need refocussing on green skills, our cities and towns need to become denser and better connected, to allow us to benefit from what is known as the agglomeration effect, raising GDP and productivity in urban centres, but only at the same time as becoming more sustainable and physically greener – through the increased provision of high quality deep green infrastructure to bring local climate resilience and public health benefits which will again reduce the long term associated costs on public finances.

How do we do this? The movement has already begun, and it revolves around the recognising the unrealised benefits of improving social value. The world’s largest investment funds are increasingly driven by ESG targets. We have become well versed in measuring and monitoring environmental impact but we are only just moving passed a largely tick box approach to evidencing social value. The UK has the second largest pensions and savings system in the world after the US with an expected £200bn to invest in UK infrastructure over the next 10 years. But in order to leverage the most out of a new era of public-private partnerships the social value of infrastructure and regeneration projects needs to be better understood. Policy interventions to date such as the Social Value Model and recommended weighting for social value criteria provide a robust platform, but needs to be followed with a renewed focus on communicating long term infrastructure investment plans and better alignment of the strategic objectives between public and private sector, all underpinned by an outcome based approach that evaluates, scores and reports on real social value realised from project inception, through procurement and delivery. The UK has made slow but meaningful progress on addressing social value when compared to other economies, but we are now in need of a step change to unlock lasting benefit and leverage the future finance available.