Dr Sarah Pritchard, Partner, Managing Director Buro Happold UK Buildings, Hong Kong and China, hosts a roundtable on ‘Doing business to meet the ever-changing challenge of climate change’.
Business leaders, in the construction industry and beyond, do not question the seriousness of climate change, we accept that we must lead the change we want to see. However, the scale of the challenge is enormous, and rather than trying to do this alone, we are likely to make much faster progress if we collaborate as leaders.
“Climate emergency” was the word of the year for 2019 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. This year’s rising emissions and record-breaking events, from hurricanes in the Atlantic to bushfires in Australia, have been met with growing outrage by millions of young people and activists, starting, of course, with Greta Thunberg. With tenacity and moral authority, as the generation that will be hardest hit by climate change, they mobilized public opinion and led individuals, companies, cities and countries to declare a climate emergency, recognizing that humanity is in a climate crisis.
Architects Declare, Engineers Declare and Contractors Declare were all part of this as the UK construction industry began to move towards proactively addressing the low carbon and operational carbon challenge. This was followed by changes to climate change legislation and the UK’s commitment to a 68% reduction in emissions by 2030. As we battled Covid 19, public opinion remained strongly in favor of keeping the focus on the climate emergency, and postponing COP 26 in Glasgow allow momentum to build and for the public and businesses to really focus on what they need to do to make change happen…and for us to get a plan behind the promises we’ve made!
Throughout its 45-year existence, Buro Happold has had a real focus on “light touch of the earth” and considering the environment and the future of people, places and the planet in everything it does. We are very focused on sustainability and how we achieve this as a company by helping our clients take that journey and develop zero-carbon buildings and reduce built-in energy.
In 2019, we set two strategic goals for our design project portfolio: to design all new construction projects to be zero-carbon in operation by 2030; and by the same deadline, reducing the carbon intensity of all new buildings, major renovations and infrastructure projects. We are also committed to reducing the carbon intensity of our operations and have set science-based targets to reduce our emissions each year, minimizing the offsets we need to make.
Organizations that do not proactively address our climate crisis will pay a price in the marketplace and in the battle for talent. Stakeholder engagement, morale and loyalty are becoming increasingly important. Will employees who have a choice want to work for a company that is not a climate champion? Would our customers and partners want to work with a company that is not a climate champion? There is no competitive advantage in meeting mandates and regulations.
So, as business leaders, how can we work together to keep moving in the right direction as well? The UK construction industry is extremely complex and interconnected. We will not succeed alone, but we will be increasingly successful if we collaborate and support each other to support customers, businesses and more broadly humanity, the planet and the creatures we share it with. Co-creation, cooperation and collaboration are critical as we determine the solutions we need to find our way to the next port (even if it’s just a waypoint) in the stormy seas of climate change.
Dr Sarah Pritchard from Buro Happold accompanied Duncan Price, Anna Woodson and Andrew Wylie. Dinner guests from Gerald Eve, Lendlease, Allies & Morrison, Laing O’Rourke, Aviva and Federated Hermes.
Buro Happold is proud of our selection of events which include specialist masterclasses, briefings, design sprints and roundtables. Carefully selected, each event is designed to help educate the industry on a range of important topics key to tackling some of the built environment’s biggest challenges. Topics including building asset transformation, operational risk and public safety, mobility, assessment tools and Net Zero Sandboxes. Register your interest by emailing [email protected].
