LCaS at Civic: driving low carbon and sustainability action
Sharing the work of our LCaS group to reduce carbon, improve sustainability and have a greater positive impact on people and place.
At Civic, our Low Carbon and Sustainability Group (LCaS) brings together expertise from across our teams, with the aim of reducing carbon, improving sustainability and having a greater positive impact on people and place.
Harriet Browning, senior associate and sustainability lead, and Katrina Wylie, associate in our civil engineering team, help steer the group. Here they share some of the great work LCaS gets up to:
Harriet: “As we experience yet another record-breaking summer filled with heatwaves, it’s a stark reminder of the climate crisis right here on our doorstep. As a major contributor to it, the built environment can and must do better.
“That’s the driving force behind our work as LCaS, as we aim to accelerate low carbon and sustainability action through research, problem solving and collaboration, and to help share those learnings with the wider industry and beyond.
“Our work spans a mix of exciting projects, including lending our expertise for independent industry reviews, creating new tools and innovative ways of working, and helping to raise awareness and share our learnings. It’s all underpinned by creativity, technical expertise and our determination to find better ways of working. Here’s just a few examples of what we get up to:
Supporting sustainable development and greater retrofit with the City of London Corporation
“We work closely with the City of London Corporation, to provide independent reviews of sustainability strategy and carbon optioneering on major development proposals. Acting as a critical friend, we help to support planning requirements while challenging project teams to achieve the best possible outcomes.
“It’s brilliant because we can combine both our low carbon technical expertise with system thinking. We draw on the knowledge of our structural engineers, our building services engineers and sustainability specialists and more here at Civic, to provide detailed technical reviews. At the same time, we help bridge different policy requirements and collaborate closely with design teams to develop robust, practical proposals.
“For each project, we typically assess the accuracy of carbon assessments, identify potential viability challenges, and explore the impact of alternative options. Our focus is on maximising retrofit and reuse, reducing embodied carbon and improving wider outcomes, such as placemaking, biodiversity and positive social impact.
“With our deep retrofit knowledge and planning appreciation, we’re able to champion retention and sensible preservation strategies, and ultimately work with project teams to improve a project’s sustainability, climate resilience and viability. Then once a scheme enters the planning process, we undertake a detailed review of its Whole Life Carbon Assessment and sustainability strategy on behalf of the City Corporation.
“Achieving the best outcomes is something we’re really passionate about, and we see a lot of opportunity to support decision-making across London boroughs.
Helping the National Trust better measure carbon
“We have also worked with the National Trust to develop practical ways of measuring the carbon implications of their conservation and new build projects of all sizes, across their sites in the North. Everything from minor roof repairs to large-scale restoration.
“When we first started working together, the National Trust was facing a significant challenge. The Trust must carry out a great deal of repair and maintenance to its historic estates, yet there were limited suitable tools available in the market that could accurately quantify carbon emissions for smaller heritage works.
“We worked closely with the National Trust’s in-house National Built Asset and Climate and Environment teams, combining our engineering expertise with digital development to develop and test the charity’s user-friendly carbon assessment tool so they could have greater visibility of the carbon impact of their work.
Accelerating Concrete Decarbonisation
“We are also members of Accelerating Concrete Decarbonisation Group (ACDG), an industry-wide initiative led by Derwent London, focused on bridging the gap between low carbon concrete supply, specification needs and market demand.
“We are among a group of more than 35 collaborators, including developers, engineers and carbon specialists. Our collective aim to increase awareness, build industry understanding, and encourage the adoption of low carbon concrete across projects of every scale, not just major developments.
“Concrete innovation is changing and evolving so much, and our mission is to create robust evidence and share the findings openly across the built environment, to enable and encourage others to specify low carbon materials with greater confidence and reduced risk.
“We invest our time and expertise in researching emerging materials and sharing our findings with the wider group to support practical implementation.
“The ACDG is the latest cross-industry initiative our team is part of, which is committed to breaking down silos between projects, design teams and regions. We were also founding members of The Engineers Reuse Collective (tERC), a not-for-profit group committed to accelerating reuse in the built environment to support the transition of the UK’s construction industry to Net Zero Carbon. You can read more about our work with ACDG here.
Preparing specifications for material reuse with The Engineers Reuse Collective
As part of our long-term collaboration with The Engineers Reuse Collective (tERC), we’re helping to prepare specifications to be shared across the engineering network, focussed on reuse.
As one example, we’re updating standard structural steelwork specifications focussed on adding and amending clauses, to promote the reuse of steelwork and set out processes on how to do so. You can read more all about tERC here.
Developing a carbon accounting tool for public realm and infrastructure projects
Katrina: “One of the biggest challenges we face, is that there’s a real lack of standardised and accessibly industry benchmarks to quantify embodied carbon in the early stage of public realm and infrastructure projects.
“Senior civil engineer Kieran Lyons and I are leading on a project to develop a tool that can measure carbon in projects ranging from pavement build-ups - which is the structure of a pavement - to drainage, earthworks and roads.
“The goal is to create an optioneering tool, so a design team can better determine the carbon implications of a project, from their choice of materials to transport.
“Our aim is that the tool will support teams to reuse and repurpose what is already there, as the carbon savings can be dramatic. We recently worked with a design team on a large park project, and they were proposing replacing an existing pavement with a new one. We advised them to keep the pavement that was already in situ and use a surface treatment where required, due to its good condition and existing contamination at the site, and as a result, the embodied carbon dropped from 400 kgCO2e/m2 to just 9 kgCO2e/m2, and they also saved around a third of the total overall project budget, which was able to go towards restoring the ecology at the park’s pond. It’s that sort of decision-making we hope to support.
“We’re working closely with Harriet and Amina Amri, sustainability consultant here at Civic, to develop the tool, and our hope is we will be able to share our findings with industry groups like Civil Engineers Declare once launched. Civil Engineers Declare is a global network of engineers dedicated to sharing knowledge and research to have a positive impact, and we’re proud to be part of it.”
Our work as LCaS is to drive action and meaningful change through collaboration. Keen to find out more? Please message Harriet.brown@team-civic.com or Katrina.wylie@team-civic.com for a conversation.
