Partner: Mott MacDonald
In 1958, scientists at Mauna Loa Observatory took their first measure of atmospheric carbon concentrations, which stood at 315 parts per million (ppm). Ice core samples show that even this was a record; in 800,000 years, up to the 20th Century, concentrations had never passed three hundred parts per million.
The scientists kept taking samples in the Hawaiian mountain air every year and in 2013 they hit a threshold: four hundred parts per million, or a third higher than ever before. Now in December 2022, with 418 parts per million on our collective ‘carbon clock’, and 2-3ppm being added every year, it is hard to ignore a sense of urgency.
As carbon concentrations rise, so does the cost of damage caused. A 2015 report by Mott MacDonald and Anglia Ruskin University found global insured losses linked to climate change had risen from US$40bn a year in 1980 to about US$160bn then. Due to rapid global development, they predicted the value of the world’s asset base would rise from $20 trillion to $80 trillion over the following 20 years to 2035.
Setting aside from the financial impact, there is a moral imperative to act as the world’s poorest people with the least responsibility for climate change will suffer some of the greatest impacts. Back in 2013, when the 400 mark was passed, the Paris Agreement was still three years away. However, the world was already beginning to turn more seriously to face the climate emergency. In that year the UK government published an important document, the Infrastructure Carbon Review, lead authored by Mott MacDonald. At the same time the first Carbon Crunch summit was held. Since then, it has been an annual event for the infrastructure sector to come together and discuss developments and best practice in decarbonisation.
In the decade since the first meeting, a lot has changed for the better. Net Zero pledges have proliferated, climate finance has been provisioned, and we have a route map to a low carbon world. But there’s little doubt our collective situation has worsened in those years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s reports now make increasingly grim reading, and the future looks bleak for island nations and coastal regions.
For the first time, the Carbon Crunch summit has added a new strand. It retains focus on carbon reduction, but shines a new spotlight on climate resilience. We’ll be looking at both of these, over two episodes of Engineering Matters.
The world is on course to exceed 1.5°C of warming. Without urgent action, it will eventually peak at 2.6 or 2.7°C of warming. Whatever success we have in limiting carbon emissions, we must also now plan how to protect ourselves and our infrastructure against these ‘baked in’ rises in global temperatures.
The first part of this article will focus on carbon reduction, and some of the current tools and initiatives that were discussed in the first half of this year’s Carbon Crunch. The second episode, which we have also linked to in the show notes, will look at the increasingly urgent resilience angle. And with the UK’s first 40C day fresh in our minds, and the record-breaking autumn storms experienced this year, this has come not a moment too soon.
But first we should understand the last decade of carbon action. We begin in 2013, with global carbon levels at 400ppm.
A decade of climate action
The first milestone was the launch of the Infrastructure Carbon Review, aligning with the inaugural Carbon Crunch. Lead author Mark Enzer said that for the first time it identified a link between reductions in carbon and reductions in cost, and set out 10 recommendations to bring both carbon and cost down simultaneously at any point in the asset lifecycle.
The following year, National Grid made the use of a Carbon Interface Toolkit (CIT) compulsory on all its projects; qualification to tender for National Grid contracts now requires measurement of carbon using the toolkit.
Then, in 2015, as the average annual carbon levels passed 400ppm for the first time, an historic agreement was made in Paris to enact measures to keep warming to at most 2°C, and to try to limit it to 1.5°C. The Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon announced that we could “finally look into the eyes of our children, our grandchildren, and we can finally tell them that we have joined hands to bequeath a more habitable world to them and to future generations”.
In the build-up to that announcement by Ban Ki-moon, then Secretary General of the United Nations, the third Carbon Crunch marked the release of the Carbon Portal, the first carbon calculator to directly measure the capital and operational carbon footprint of BIM-designed assets.
In 2016 the British Standards Institute published Pas 2080. A precursor to the eventual release of an international standard for managing infrastructure carbon. The BSi described it as “much needed guidance to help all asset owners make the most of carbon management” and “a complete rethink of business as usual”.
A PAS is a ‘publicly available specification’ – a document much like a standard, but which is released to address a pressing need, while inviting industry input and revision… Pas 2080 will return later in this episode.
In 2017 it was announced that the US would become the first country to pull out of the Paris Agreement, although owing to delays and a change of administration, it eventually only left for two months at the end of 2020.
In the UK, the country’s second carbon budget, which ran from 2013-17, is met, with emissions down 43% versus 1990. The government also published its Clean Growth Strategy, setting out policies and proposals to deliver increased economic growth and decreased emissions. Plans included greenhouse gas removal technologies, improving the energy efficiency of homes, and prohibiting the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040.
In 2018, the UK’s third carbon budget (2018-22) started, with a target of reducing emissions to 37% of 1990 levels. In Poland, a tense Cop 24 took place as countries wrestled with competing climate priorities and attempted to create a ‘rulebook’ for implementing the Paris Agreement. There were some financing wins and an agreement was reached, but observers complained about a ‘lack of urgency’.
In 2019 the UK government legally committed to cut national greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050, becoming the first major economy in the world to make such a pledge. A number of companies in the infrastructure sector formed ‘the UK Net-Zero Infrastructure Industry Coalition’, aimed at achieving that target.
In 2020, the global economy shuddered as the coronavirus pandemic swept around the world. Much financial firepower was diverted to supporting communities amidst the lockdown of entire populations. Carbon emissions fell sharply due to the economic shutdown… but rebounded within the year.
In 2021, COP 26 was held in Glasgow, a year late due to Covid, with the aim of ‘keeping 1.5 alive’. Existing arguments around financing and transparency intensified as wealthy nations missed a target of $100 billion in annual climate finance. But there were major wins on deforestation, methane and Net Zero targets. A last minute intervention by India and China saw language around coal reductions softened, leading to an apology by an emotional Alok Sharma, the UK’s COP President. A crisis-weary world tried to leave Covid behind and focus once again on the greatest challenge of a generation: climate change. The coming year would not be gentle to those hopes, as governments, industries and communities were forced to confront yet more challenges. Some foreseen, and some completely unexpected, as Ukraine became the strategic focus for many in the world.
The 10th Carbon Crunch brought climate and infrastructure experts together in person for the first time in two years due to the pandemic hiatus, and the stakes were as high as they had ever been.
Decarbonisation
Collaboration is more important than ever. Society is in the midst of an energy crisis that is testing our infrastructure, economy and communities. The reliance on fossil fuels makes us vulnerable and the climate threats are very real. The summer heatwave across the UK and Europe, the floods in Pakistan, and the recent hurricanes in Florida are just a few events that really bring it home. Because of that interconnectedness, we either are successful together, or we fail together.
Infrastructure in the UK is responsible for more than half of the UK’s total carbon emissions and PAS 2080 is a critical document for the industry. That was the one released in 2016 and provides guidance for managing carbon in infrastructure. It is something that is at the heart of an industry trying to build back better. But at the heart of each individual working in the sector, is often a moment in their past when the climate emergency first truly struck them.
Environment Agency
Simon Dawes, Head of Sustainable Business Strategy at the Environment Agency recalls, “I remember my GCSE geography teacher telling me that atmospheric CO2 was 370 parts per million. And if ever we got to 400, we were in real trouble. Well, we are there now.”
Dawes was responsible for developing a Net Zero roadmap for the organisation over the last few years. He says writing the roadmap was fairly simple, it took four days sitting at a desk. But getting it integrated and ‘owned’ was a challenge. An important part of this was building carbon assessment into the Environment Agency’s appraisal process for its schemes, making carbon assessment a key part of deciding what gets built. Then they took an end-goal budget approach to carbon reduction. They looked at their target date for net-zero target and calculated what the annual carbon reduction needed to be.
“So our carbon target now reflects the shape of the work that we’ve got to do,” says Dawes. “So teams have a budget. And through our procurement process. We’ve integrated carbon into incentivizing our suppliers to deliver on their carbon goals. But we definitely haven’t got it all right. The first thing they teach you at Harvard Business School is ‘that the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing’. And the main thing is climate change.”
And this message needs to be emphasised over and over again to make sure it filters through the business. Because, he says, people do not fully appreciate the scale of the challenge facing us.
National Grid
Christine Glew is the Sustainability Manager for National Grid – Gas Transmission & Metering. She has also overseen her organisation’s ‘green journey’ for the last 10 years.
Glew says, “I would like to talk a little bit about reality, and how difficult all of this is. Just before the Infrastructure Carbon Review, we had a very small team. We built a carbon interface tool, and we started measuring the carbon footprint of our schemes in design. Now at that time, nobody was interested. There was no focus on carbon. But we knew it was the right thing to do. We knew what was coming in.”
After the review and the rush of projects and organisations trying to work out carbon footprints, Christine was able to point to 200 of National Grid’s schemes and demonstrate that every £1 million spent resulted in emissions of 252 tonnes of carbon.
Glew adds, “And then all eyes opened, and realised there’s something in this. So we set a target for a 10% reduction in carbon, year-on-year. We aimed to get about 50% reduction in five years. At the end of the five years, we did only manage 33%. But that was good considering we started at nothing.”
They got the designers involved, looking to build less and build smart. They also had to change specifications which were a blocker initially, and by 2015 they could put carbon as a weighting into a project’s bid documentation for the first time.
The winning bid said it could reduce carbon by 23% which equated to £3 million, and that bid won. But a lesson learned was to conduct follow-up checks as no-one on the delivery team had seen the tender and had no idea how to reduce carbon. This was 10 years ago and in some ways Christine’s team had to start again. But they did it, and at the end of the project the target was hit.
“So I suppose my message is: you get it in the tender, you get it in the contract, but you can’t stop there,” says Glew. “You can’t turn away and focus on something else, you have to keep going back. On all our major projects, we have a sustainability review. And that starts with one of us going in at the beginning and saying: ‘right, the commitments you’ve made, how are you going to deliver them and forcing the contractor to give us that action plan for us to monitor’.”
But National Grid did find as they monitored this over the next five years that for every 10% a company focuses on reducing carbon, it reduces costs by 6%. And on some assets it was as high as 11%. It validates further the business case put forward in the Infrastructure Carbon Review.
PAS 2080 update
A number of lessons have been learned in recent years, and six years on from its publication, PAS 2080 was due an update. This will be released late in 2022 and there are a number of changes:
- Expanding scope to include the whole built environment, including both buildings and infrastructure.
- Clarifying the role of everyone in the value chain when it comes to controlling and influencing emissions in a Net Zero context
- Increasing the emphasis on a whole life carbon approach. This involves addressing the urgent need to decarbonise systems, networks and assets.
- Consideration of other demands, such as climate resilience
- And emphasising the importance of leadership and collaboration
Nature based solutions will have a part to play, perhaps replacing some of the functions of hard infrastructure, but definitely for carbon sequestration. But above all of this, is the systems-thinking that needs to be adopted across industry and the built environment. Each individual asset is not to be considered in isolation, but a cog in the existing built environment system. It is necessary to build and capitalise as much as possible on that interface between the different individual assets and look for carbon reductions in places that we haven’t dared go before or systems are not applied.
“We do not want people to think about building a net zero road,” says Maria Manidaki, Technical Director at Mott MacDonald. “Why is that? Because it might create unintended consequences of trying to match the balance of the net, and coming up with offsets, and perhaps land use changes that are not adequate at the system level.”
Whenever targets are set, it is important to demonstrate an understanding of what the network, or whatever system the asset is operating in, looks like. A lot of feedback has been submitted from the industry, showing that major asset owners have not set targets yet, and the industry is working on its own. Maria also makes a point is in line with Simon’s carbon budget approach to decarbonisation.
“A percent reduction is not good enough anymore. We’re operating in a net zero world. So we need to think about absolute reductions. And the importance in needs of the delivery stages to have the right functional unit is pivotal. So when we’re talking about at the programme level, let’s have absolute tonnes of CO2.”
The costs of deep decarbonisation
Adam Crossley is the Director of Environment at Skanska, which was the first major contractor to become PAS 2080 verified. He comes at the decarbonisation challenge from a different angle to the previous guests, and has a concern.
“My thesis, my proposal, my point of today is that as an industry, we have a deep decarbonisation blind spot,” says Crossley.
Skanska undertook an analysis to understand the relationship of carbon and cost on a major infrastructure project in Europe. As carbon value engineering was undertaken, costs initially decrease.
“And that’s what most projects do. That’s what mostly PAS 2080 kind of thinking is driving. That’s what most of the industry is going at, at project level, and also system level. And we know about that,” says Crossley. “And it makes good sense, doesn’t it? Because it’s cost reduction. carbon reduction is a brilliant business case. And it’s also a great political case.”
But as efforts continue, eventually the cost reduction begins to trend upwards. Entering an area Crossley calls deep decarbonisation. When all of the efficiency savings have been made, the final bit of carbon removal actually costs more. Although he does say that industry is nowhere near this point yet.
“As long as we need heavy bits of structural materials to hold our projects together and hold them up and hold our bridges together, then we’re talking about steel, and we’re talking about cement, and we’re talking about concrete. And as long as we need heavy bits of kit with wheels on to move those around and put them together, maybe even move them from an off-site prefab […] then we’re talking about big heavy diesel engines, which we don’t have solutions for.”
So Crossley argues that we must consider two phases of carbon reduction: carbon value engineering which reduces cost while reducing carbon, and then a turning point where you need to pivot into deep decarbonisation.
Science-based targets
Before we can even approach that point, first we have to begin to get on the right track. Tim Young is the Manager for Net Zero Finance at the Science Based Targets Initiative. Which is a partnership between CDP, the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
“If you think of carbon dioxide emissions as a bucket,” says Young. “And we’ve used most of what’s in that bucket, the IPCC said last year, there are approximately 500 gigatonnes of CO2 left for fossil fuel companies and corporates to use If we go over that target, we are unlikely within certain probability levels to reach a 1.5-degree temperature rise and minimising it to that by 2050.
“So what SBTI does is it says, ‘Okay, how can we allocate those additional carbon dioxide emissions between now and 2050?’ It’s between the different sectors between steel, cement, transportation, and food, land and agriculture. We look at all those sectors and allocate carbon dioxide emissions on a pathway to net zero by 2050.”
Then SBTI invites companies that have announced they will be setting Net Zero targets (or near term, which SBTI defines as 10-year targets) to come and talk with SBTI to validate those targets from a scientific perspective.
“By allocating then from their sectors, if they’re a cement company, allocating a specified percentage of those emissions to their business, depending upon their importance, obviously, as turnover against worldwide turnover and overall emissions from that sector at the current stage, and we then put them on a pathway to net zero, using agreed budgets and processes.”
Currently over 4,000 companies have committed to setting science-based targets with SBTI. A lot of these are near-term targets, But more and more now on net zero to 2050 targets amongst corporates. Young says this now represents $15 trillion in market value and 22% of the Global Fortune 500. It is gaining momentum, and by setting criteria and validating it in companies’ financial reports, SBTI is able to determine whether a company is on a 1.5°C pathway.
The next decade in decarbonisation
The next decade of action on carbon will perhaps be the most significant of all. We are the first generation to feel the effects of climate change, and the last with a chance to mitigate them. Perhaps the best way to predict the next 10 years is to look back at the last 10.
David Riley, Head of Carbon Neutrality at Anglian Water attended both the first Carbon Crunch and this latest one. He summed up his impression of the difference in four words.
“Skills, capabilities, knowledge and awareness,” he says. “I’m reflecting on 2013 sitting in this exact same room, and hearing the questions that were coming from the audience, and how the questions today are radically different than what we were speaking about back then. And that translates through to Anglian Water, because it’s how we use the growing level of skills, capability, knowledge and awareness, combined with the leadership that we need to hit those really challenging targets around net zero by 2030, and significant reductions in capital, carbon, and reductions in cost. Because that’s really where the challenge with it sits, there are so many different challenges that we face, both within the water sector and beyond. And it’s how we stay the course in terms of delivering against our net zero ambition.”
The next 10 years builds on a far firmer foundation of awareness and skills than the last 10 years, and young engineers coming to the industry are aware of, and highly motivated to deal with, these issues.
Another person well placed to look into the future of a decarbonising industry is Mark Enzer, a Strategic Advisor at Mott MacDonald and lead author of the Infrastructure Carbon Review back in 2013.
“I would maybe summarise it in terms of over the next 10 years, we really need to see more connections. And I think that there are a number of different connections that we need to consider there. There’s definitely kind of connections across the system that we’ve talked about, and connections across organisations to facilitate that, and the data connections, the information flow, to enable all of this lovely stuff. The future is federated.
Enzer says that it is important to remember that our system of systems, the built environment, is ultimately about getting the outcomes we want for society and nature.
“To my mind, its kind of a key definition of value in this context, is getting more outcomes per pound, not just having cheaper construction, and there’s a big difference there and getting more outcomes per pound for people and nature is still a massive challenge. Climate change doesn’t happen in silos, it is much more complicated than that and affects us in a systemic way.
“Now, with it being so complex and interconnected, there’s no way that we can control it, but we can understand it better, and we can intervene more effectively. And I think that’s where the data point comes in. Because we really need that data in order to generate the understanding in order to get the insights in order to make the better decisions in order to drive the better interventions. So in some ways, we have a lot of the answer in our hands. But talking about the next 10 years, we’ve got an immense amount of work to do to make it actually work. Because at the moment, it doesn’t at the moment, we work in silos.
“Crucially, we need to get an information flow across organisation and sector boundaries. And that’s kind of what I was starting with saying that we need to have more connections, more connections of people across systems and data and digital. And to me, that’s a pretty meaty challenge for 10 years.”
The last decade or so has seen targets agreed that will mitigate against the most catastrophic warming outcomes that we might have expected. Sadly, some of the severe weather events that have accompanied the rises we have seen have been more extreme than predicted. This is why the topic of the second part of this article will become of increasing importance.
Resilience in a changing world
A theme in the work of those in the infrastructure resilience sector is that the agenda is focusing on them too late.
“But there is still time,” says Emma Howard Boyd CBE, Co-chair of the Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment (CCRI), Chair of the Green Finance Institute and former Chair of the Environment Agency. “There has to be time.”
The dreadful human costs of climate inaction are being felt. And we are only just beginning to feel the first effects of climate change. As our infrastructure is exposed to greater risks, the impacts on people and communities will be even more profound.
“The World Meteorological organisation has just published a report which says that the world’s energy infrastructure is at significant risk from climate change as extreme weather events threaten dams, thermal power plants, and nuclear stations. Flood and drought risk was a particular highlight. According to the report just 40% of nationally determined contributions submitted by the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, prioritise adaptation in the energy sector, climate adaptation, focused investments in the energy sector remain very low at just over $300 million US dollars tracked per year in 2019/2020.”
But a silver lining is that industry now has the data to show that investing in adaptation and resilience works.
“Last year, the Environment Agency completed the government’s £2.6 billion six-year capital flood programme on time and on budget. It means that 700 flood schemes are better protecting more than 300,000 homes, nearly 600,000 acres of agricultural land thousands of businesses and major pieces of infrastructure. The government has upped the budget of the new programme to a record £5.2 billion.”
We haven’t avoided the effects of climate change, and so now we face the twin challenges of resilience and decarbonisation. However, not everything is doom and gloom. The real world has always been about trade-offs. Infrastructure resilience always was a smart bet, but the increasing costs of doing nothing are making it an essential bet. But as we will see in this article, it does not necessarily have to be in competition with other sustainable priorities. It can complement them.
The impact of change
Denise Bower is the External Engagement Director at Mott MacDonald. Another leader in building relationships and collaboration, her role at Carbon Crunch was to set out the initial case for resilience alongside decarbonisation.
“Around the world infrastructure and buildings are being damaged by increasingly severe and frequent weather events, sea level rise and essential services are being disrupted,” says Bower. “Around the world infrastructure and buildings are being damaged by increasingly severe and frequent weather events. For infrastructure owners and operators, revenues and profits have been hit repair and maintenance bills are rising and it’s becoming harder to attract investment and secure insurance as value is being lost. So we must address the impacts of climate change […] I want to be really clear about how immediate this threat is to us all.”
Failing to adapt and build resilience will make much infrastructure and therefore entire communities unsustainable. Insurer, Munich Re calculates that in the first half of 2022, climate linked extreme weather caused $65 billion in losses worldwide. That’s double the losses for the same six months in 2018. IPCC data shows that 3 billion people are now that classed as living in areas that are vulnerable to climate change
Infrastructure is everything: energy, water, wastewater and transportation. And yet it is hard to get the funding to secure it for the future. Trillions of pounds of investment will be required worldwide, but so far infrastructure owners and operators have struggled to set out a business case to show this.
But, Bower adds, “I am pleased to share that the situation is improving. at Mott MacDonald we’ve been working with the Coalition for climate resilient investment to develop the Physical Climate Risk Assessment Methodology [PCRAM]. Basically, PCRAM does what it says. It provides a methodology that allows you to assess and understand exposure to physical climate risks. It can be applied to existing or proposed assets and examines the probability severity and consequences of harm. It shows infrastructure owners where to prioritise investment in resilience. And it also enables resilience options to be assessed for their effectiveness.”
Resilience is critical to the functioning and prosperity of communities, and so industry desperately needs to make that business case.
Making the business case
Richard Thorp is the Engineering Director for High Speed 1, the 110km high speed rail line between London and the Channel Tunnel. Like a lot of private infrastructure run under a concession, the concession to operate in this case is owned by two pension groups.
“And they’re really keen to make sure that HS1 gives the return that they need it to give over the 30 years of the concession. So we’re just heading into our next price review. So an absolutely perfect time for us to be thinking about how we pricing infrastructure resilience into that,” says Thorp. “[Due to Covid] we’re not awash with money to spend on renewables and resilience. So we have to be really, really careful about what we what we spend money on, and how we articulate that.”
Thorp says resilience is a compelling business case, and like any other it needs to be based on economy – particularly building resilience measures into already-planned interventions to make such interventions as efficient and low cost as possible. But the key is the evidence.
“It’s got to be really accessible to people who are who are investing and spending their money. It’s got to be applied to the, the asset and the project. And it’s also got to be relatable.”
Effectively this means being able to state specific impacts of not investing in resilience.
“But I think the key bit is the accessibility point. I see my job is translating the science and the all of the work that the consultants do into a language that firstly, I understand and I can I can interpret and understand what that means to my assets. But then I can also articulate it clearly to the people who are going to pay for it.”
The next part of the puzzle is to understand the views of investors and policy makers. The Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment (or CCRI) was launched at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 to support such groups. It has 120 members with $20 trillion in assets under management.
Alexandre Chavarot is a Strategic Advisor at the Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment. He says from the point of the investment community there are five key issues. Firstly, is for them and the entire infrastructure related community to understand the value created by investment in resilience. In other words to shift the debate from this being an idea of incremental costs, to it being about creating value. This first requires thinking about the entire lifecycle of an asset, where an upfront capital expenditure on resilience results in reduced operating and maintenance costs. And to identify how that incremental investment in resilience will lead to more predictable net operating revenues.
Chavarot says the second is to contrast this with risk transfer options. The practice of asset managers today is to insure against risks and do a cost benefit analysis.
“But I think that that doesn’t take into account is dynamic aspects of resilience. And the fact that certain insurance products may no longer be available at some point in the future, or that indeed, their premium might increase very significantly, all of which are data that we don’t have today.”
So that cost benefit analysis would be incomplete. Better to invest in resilience as a known quantity.
“The third point [is] to have a methodology for doing that. And so at CCRI, with the very significant involvement of Mott MacDonald and indeed using case studies, such as HS1, we’ve developed the Physical Climate Risk Assessment Methodology, otherwise known as PCRAM. And so our suggestion, strong suggestion, is that this methodology becomes mainstream in the design of assets, but also in the appraisal of investments by the investment community, and in lender due diligence.”
The fourth point is that this form of assessment should be done by the entire investment community as part of its due diligence, much in the way Environmental Social Impact Assessments have been done for decades.
And finally, resilience assessments need to be done at all of the key points in the life of an asset, not just at the onset or at construction completion. Regular review is critical.
New sources of investment
In 2021 the UK’s Treasury launched the UK Infrastructure Bank into this arena. It’s an independent but state-owned entity, an organisation the British Government refers to as an “Arm’s Length Body”. It has £22 billion to invest in infrastructure, lending to local authorities as well as providing guarantees. It has two strategic objectives: helping tackle climate change (in particular, helping the UK to achieve net zero by 2050), and local economic development.
Iliana Lazarova, Head of ESRG at the UK Infrastructure Bank says, “One of our investment principles is to unlock private capital. So I think one of the main things on how we can invest more is collaboration between the public and the private sector and more public and private partnerships, because there’s a lot of money to be deployed in resilient infrastructure in achieving net zero. And it can’t be done just by one of the either public or private investors.
“[Transparency to potential investors is important] Understanding how the risks can be clearly quantified, and how they can clearly be married to better valuations, because infrastructure assets are very long term. And if you’re only doing appraisal at the beginning, it’s hard to married, the investment that you can make in resilience, how it’s going to improve your value down the road.”
The bank also hopes to see the development of nature-based solutions that offer a return and add to the business case of resilience.
There is work to do on the finance side but a growing awareness that resilience isn’t an expense, if considered properly. But on the infrastructure side, there are tools and improvements underway to help make this case.
Sarah Hayes works at the Connected Places Catapult as the Strategic Engagement Lead for ‘Credo’ (short for Climate Resilience Demonstrator). She says there is a continuing lack of data on the vulnerability of infrastructure to extreme weather and the steps being taken to manage interdependencies across the sectors. And this is the space that Credo is in, this is the problem that it is trying to solve.
“So Credo is a climate change adaptation digital twin. We bring together data across energy, water and telecoms networks. We’re working with Anglian Water, with UK Power Networks and with BT, who bring their people and their data to this project. So we’re able to bring together data about these infrastructure assets into one place so that we can create a big picture of the infrastructure system to start to see how all the different assets connect up and what the system looks like,” says Hayes.
One thing they are looking at is the impact of future flooding scenarios on the infrastructure system.
“Just by bringing together this data into one place, you can start to see those interdependencies across the across the different networks. And we have a flood model, which looks at future flooding scenarios. So it will look at say, a one and 100 year storm and look at the surface water flooding scenario arising from that. And in the digital twin, we have an asset failure model, which looks at the probability of assets failing when they are wet. And then we have a system impact model, which takes those wet failed assets and propagates the failure across the whole system.”
A potential operator might get to see unexpected impacts, such as assets failing in dry areas because they are dependent on the failed assets in wet areas. So we can use this kind of digital twin to help us think about what can we do to prepare in advance of these kind of extreme weather events happening, or how can we better respond.
Credo was initially launched through the National Digital Twin Programme in the Centre for Digital Built Britain… see Engineering Matters episode #31 Creating a National Digital Twin for more information on that project. It’s since been taken forward into its second phase by Connected Places Catapult, focused on planning and reporting.
But not everything relies on modern technological marvels such as a connected digital twin. Organisations can build resilience across systems by communicating and collaborating with each other, both in their long-term planning and in the way they respond to emergencies. A good example of this is Water Resources Southeast, which is an alliance of six water companies working on a multi-sector resilience plan that will lead up to the end of the century. It is based on data from agriculture, power and other sectors, bringing them all together to work on the bigger picture. For example, designing a pipeline that can pump in two directions can protect two separate regions from drought with one piece of infrastructure. And improved customer relations unlocks the potential for superior demand management during these drought periods. If water companies speak with one voice on the issue of drought, there is a better chance that customers will listen.
A moment of transformational change
We are at a moment in time when transformational changes are happening in infrastructure, as well as society at large, as we get to grips with the reality of anthropogenic climate change. There is an opportunity to embed resilience and adaptability into this change right from the start and approach the challenge intelligently.
Lisa Constable is the Strategic Lead for Weather Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation and the Great British Railways Transition Team. It’s an organisation that works for government to consider all of the priorities around rail together, and then comes up with optimum solutions for the future. It’s an excellent example of a major asset base taking joined-up action towards a climate resilient approach.
“Looking at the future and the next 10 years for resilience. I felt that it was better to talk about in the rail industry’s plan for climate change adaptation and how we’re building that into the transformation of the railway over the next 30 years,” says Constable.
The Williams-Shapps plan for rail was published in May 2021 and named for Keith Williams, the chair of the independent Rail Review and Grant Shapps, then Secretary of State for Transport. Its implementation is the purpose of the ‘GBRTT’. But the government has given the organisation five key objectives based on this: improving value for money, improving performance, providing multimodal options for getting end-to-end along the journey, maintaining a safe railway, and delivering financial sustainability (or, reducing costs to government).
In response the GBRTT is working on a strategy to work towards these objectives.
Constable says, “Delivery of all of these objectives is very significantly impacted if we can’t keep the railway open because of bad weather. And the final objective is delivering environmental sustainability, which is our decarbonisation goal, protecting biodiversity addressing air pollution, and protecting transport links by investing in climate adaptation. And so my task was to come in and develop the climate change adaptation chapter for the strategy. And I’m presenting the draft of the climate change strategy, which is going through various internal discussions.”
This is expected to be submitted to the government by the end of 2022.
“We’ve all seen the pictures,” adds Constable. “Waves completely washing away sections of track heavy rain causing embankment failures and flooding. This summer we have significant impacts from heat actually shutting the railway rather than trying to run trains and risk damaging the infrastructure. leaves on the line at autumn and trees coming down. You know, we’re coming into autumn season and storms and wind blowing objects onto the track.. trampolines and balloons are very common. And then snow, you know so all of these weather types have impact on the railway and trying to manage 30,000 kilometres of track long linear infrastructure across the whole country with, you know, millions of different types of assets is a really big challenge.
The starting point for the assessment was to look at Network Rail’s data for delays and cancellations over the last 15 years. In the “old days” we had wet and windy days, we had cold and snowy period. But today the network has everything thrown at it in in greater quantities and with shorter increments of time between different effects. GBRTT baselined the data and saw an increase of 17 to 33% in weather related delays, equating to about 15 to 30 million pounds per year.
Constable cites the Conwy Valley Line as a good example of how investing early pays off. It has been washed away a number of times in recent years. The first time it was rebuilt, it washed away in the same location three years later. On the second rebuild, rock armour was added to the side of the rail. That is a rock embankment at the side of the track. It doesn’t seem to be doing anything, but since being installed the exact same location has flooded four more times without being washed away.
“The total spend on the resilience was 6 million of a 10 million pounds scheme and in the last few years, we’ve already saved 8 million pounds, so it’s paid for itself already. It’s very difficult to get this kind of data to demonstrate the business case and the reason why I’m doing this, but this is the best example we haven’t really shows how quickly return on investment can be achieved,” says Constable.
It is important to think long term, rather than just responding to the most recent incidents. So GBRTT came up with a number of strategic areas to deliver adaptive capacity on the railway. The first is ‘strategy and planning’, looking at long-term climate change adaptation plans which will be developed over the next five years. Also looking at who they can partner with, where they can take advantage of niche solutions… but also deciding which sections of the railway need to be abandoned.
The second is ‘capability and training’, looking at improving the maturity of the industry as a whole. So organisations can access each other’s capabilities and share knowledge. Understanding where to focus efforts on enhancing capability.
Then there is ‘information and intelligence’, bringing in multiple systems that already exist and will help them understand risk and vulnerability. Plus the expansion of live asset monitoring and technology on-train to feed yet more data back to operators.
And then finally ‘investment in resilient assets’
Constable concludes, “Ultimately, we need a step change in how much we’re investing in our assets. But at the moment, we can’t demonstrate the business case for why we need that extra money and where we need to invest it. And so that’s where we go back to the strategic planning, which is developing the long-term plans which say where and when we need to invest.”
Check out the Carbon Crunch website for more information on the event and the industry’s efforts to protect against climate change, both the current effects, and preventing worse to come.
This article was based on a two-part special episode of Engineering Matters:
#193 Carbon Crunch (Part 1): The Decarbonisation Decade
And
#193 Carbon Crunch (Part 2): Resilience in a Changing World
