Paris, the city of love, is also the city where the global community finally rallied together to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The historic Paris Agreement, born from the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21), set a laudable ambition “to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the increase even further to 1.5 degrees.”
This year’s COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt was forced to face the unfortunate realization that this goal is destined for failure. Lovers: you may want to remove your padlocks from the Pont des Arts before they drown in rising waters.
The SDGs and digitalization
I’ve written about how digitalization aligns even the most maligned of industries with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, hence, with impactful decarbonization initiatives. The progress, or lack thereof, on our global climate change initiatives drives this message home like a knuckleball to the nose.
The UN has endorsed digitalization as an essential pathway through which to achieve the SDGs. Particularly in remote and less developed parts of the world, digitalization of capital infrastructure projects is a panacea benefitting every actor including owners, operators, contractors, and even host countries particularly when domestic labor is employed.
Why? Because digitalization is a universally beneficial mechanism for infrastructure projects to support all three pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. The digital oversight of construction saves time, money and material resources. It upskills workers, unites globally-fragmented project teams and reduces waste.
Digitalization paves way for the SDGs
Those specializing in construction execution of capital infrastructure works are well poised to have impact on the SDGs because construction projects are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Globally, buildings and construction contribute nearly 40 percent of energy-related carbon emissions, a staggering figure. And that’s just energy-related emissions; infrastructure at large contributes an eye-watering 79 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The World Economic Forum reports how “the buildings and construction sector moved away and not towards the Paris Agreement…” There is opportunity here.
Construction innovation is at least part of the answer to decarbonizing capital projects and mitigating infrastructure’s contribution to climate change. The capital projects sector (and lifecycle management of built assets, more generally) must answer the COP27 call of action by moving in the direction of the SDGs and not further away. But how?
Construction innovation
Construction innovation is made up of both design and technological innovation.
Design of infrastructure and building systems informs construction methodology and available techniques. Industrial asset design of the future will likely see pre-fabricated, plug-and-play components that support asset modularity. This design choice, that minimizes materials resource-use consumption, bolsters asset responsiveness and flexibility as well as reduces environmental footprint.
Construction technological innovation is, effectively, the use of digitalization in the infrastructure’s lifecycle. Digitalization, in this context, is the use of software and accompanying hardware that allows managerial oversight, planning, administration and quality assurance from a computer or mobile device. In our increasingly digital world, this may sound obvious, but industrial construction in the energy sector is behind the mark in terms of digital maturity.
Adopting existing digitalization tools in capital project construction slashes embodied carbon outputs. For sectors such as Oil & Gas, digitalization is the low-hanging fruit in the quest towards decarbonization.
Digital construction mitigates embodied carbon
What does digitalization do to construction’s environmental footprint?
The most significant contributor to building-and-construction greenhouse gas emissions is embodied carbon, which has to do with the materials value-and-supply chain processes used in construction as well as the asset operational lifecycle. For industrial or other functional assets, these things are both complex and expansive.
Directing the intricacies of materials, and of the asset at large, demands sophisticated information management to decarbonize projects. In this way, construction can implement a Lean, sustainable approach.
Conventional methods that rely on inordinate amounts of paper, word of mouth and incompatible systems simply don’t cut it. Such methods are inherently wasteful – of time, money and resources. They suffocate potential, impede progress and decimate positive impact.
Pro-development vs pro-environment
It is possible to be both pro-development and pro-environment.
Economic considerations are an oft overlooked pillar of sustainability in the public discourse. Engineering and construction firms are experiencing a moment of opportunity amid the climate crisis, but what they do with it will determine the future: from the extent of construction decarbonization to the capacity to build social capital with these efforts.
Digital construction mechanisms are universally beneficial not just on a project basis, keeping works coordinated, on time and within budget, but also on a global scale, reducing one of the most massive contributors to global carbon outputs and making initiatives such as the Paris Agreement less farcical and more achievable. What’s not to love?
An earlier version of this story first appeared here.