From brick counter to carbon counter

When you get to my age you start to see patterns in life – something new comes along which you have not come across before but you can see similarities with it from the past. That is happening again right now. The new thing is sustainability.

Construction contributes around 60% of UK carbon emissions. Buildings make up 50%, while transport and materials manufacture contribute 8-10%. So there’s no doubt our industry must do its bit to help the environment.

Sustainability looks just like project management did about 20 years ago when it started to emerge as a separate service. Previously, architects had carried out a pale version of project management as part of their general contract administration role but, in order to have schemes delivered better, clients started to demand a separate “professional” project management service. Architects should have been able to grab this and make it their own as they were the closest thing there was to project management at the time.

The truth was that, in general, architects were more interested in design. QSs fought to win the role as we considered ourselves to be more strategic, logical and methodical, so therefore better suited to it.

We took over project management because of those base skills, by recruiting new people and teaching ourselves new skills. It was quite a step up the food chain.

So back to today, when sustainability is the fastest growing thing in construction and property. The activity across the industry is huge:

• The Government is ratcheting up its requirements with initiatives like Part L of the Building Regulations and the EU Building Performance Directive.

• English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation are progressively raising their sustainability requirements.

• The Carbon Trust and WRAP are helping organisations reduce their carbon emissions and promoting sustainable waste management.

We have the hunger to take over sustainability, just like in the early days of project management

Sustainability is complex. It means taking account of and improving performance in diverse areas such as the overall management of the building, materials and their life cycle, energy use, health and wellbeing, pollution, transport, ecology and water. All of these are set against a backdrop of cost.

Improving performance in one area tends to have an impact on other areas. For instance, changing external cladding materials to increase the energy performance of a building will almost certainly mean a higher capital cost but lower energy consumption. Which option is best? There is, of course, a conventional way to solve this question. By running a fairly simple life cycle cost model dealing with capital and running costs over the life of the building, differing options can each be netted back to a single present day cost.

While this may now be mainstream, how do you weigh up more complicated options, such as whether to provide parking at the building or a mini-bus shuttle service? You could do a life cycle study of each, taking into account all the costs but what about CO2 emissions and the impact on people’s wellbeing? You can’t cost these things, so which is the best option? To make decisions in sustainability you frequently need to invent a new framework of priorities before you can come to an answer.

So who is going to take over the lead role in sustainability? Whoever it is must have a relevant core skill, intelligence, interest in the area, the ability to think critically and a logical and balanced way of addressing problems.

Services engineers are possible candidates. They are familiar with building systems and are arguably more logical than QSs. But in the final analysis, I believe that they want to design M&E systems – that’s what turns them on.

Architects could grab it. They have the best overall view of the building and some have a passion for sustainability. Apologies to all of my architect friends (or perhaps ex-friends once this is published) but I think they are more interested in design and in generating new ideas and are not so gripped by forensic analysis and logical decision making.

So the prime candidates are QSs. Our current job is essentially to weigh up complicated factors and recommend the best answer. We have the hunger to take over sustainability, just like in the early days of project management.

The QS workload in sustainability is growing at a frightening rate and a whole new area of the profession is opening up. Opportunities are there to join in and be at the leading edge. In my experience though, QSs have not shown much sign of wanting to be involved so far. Unless they do soon, we will lose this service to the engineers.