Enabling Whole Life Carbon

Key information:

The water sector faces numerous challenges due to climate change; acute pressures on water scarcity, and increasing demand. The sector also has to play its part in reducing climate-change-causing gases to net zero. In the UK, infrastructure is responsible for half of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. Of this, 30% is attributed to construction and maintenance of assets – including those used by the water sector.  

In order to tackle the challenge of infrastructure emissions, the sector must work together to reduce carbon emissions and the current costs in tackling them. This is vital to the long-term prosperity of the sector and its customers – reducing carbon emissions will not only ultimately cut customer bills,  but also improve the sector’s environmental impact.  

The UK water sector has a long history of measuring, managing and reducing carbon emissions. In 2006, the UKWIR Carbon Accounting Workbook was created, and frameworks for measuring whole life carbon first released two years later. This early collaboration provided the foundation for sector performance today – leading to the ambitious goal of achieving net zero emissions before the government target of 2050. 

In 2019, the sector pledged to continue to reduce the capital carbon (the carbon emissions associated with the creation of an asset) and costs of the assets it builds to reach net zero operational emissions by 2030. This means the sector expects to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by over 10 million tonnes in the next 10 years

Despite this, to date, this hasn’t accurately and entirely captured whole life carbon metrics (the sum of both set-up and operating carbon emissions).  

The Enabling Whole Life Carbon project, funded by the Ofwat Innovation Fund, set out to tackle several challenges that the water sector still faces when working towards net zero emissions:  

1. A lack of whole life carbon metrics (the sum of both capital and operational carbon emissions) 
2. The carbon and cost cause-and-effect relationship not being fully understood 
3. A lack of integration between data and systems 
4. Carbon data not being easy to interpret 
5. Project governance focusing on capital and operational carbon (rather than whole life carbon) 

The team developed a common carbon (the universal method of measuring a building’s carbon footprint) cost management framework, aligned to industry standards (PAS 2080), and digital design tools to enable the visualisation of carbon and cost hotspots in real time. The data visualisation meant that multiple parts of the value chain could be viewed. The framework also includes guidance on building a carbon data library, calculating whole life carbon, aligning carbon, cost and data models, visualising data, embedding visualisation into your data and governance processes, and managing organisational change.