To cater for this new era, Turner & Townsend has produced its own embodied carbon calculator.

According to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, it is “exactly what the industry needs”.

Turner & Townsend’s embodied carbon calculator is bespoke software that enables clients to evaluate the carbon footprint of projects themselves from an early design stage, from inception to completion of the construction process.  (The publicity material makes no reference to whole life carbon costs.)

The tool is designed to follow established project planning stages, starting from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) stage 2. It aligns with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) New Rules of Measurement 1 (NRM1) and third-party standards such as the UK Green Building Council, as well as benchmarking performance against industry targets proposed by LETI, the London Energy Transformation Initiative.

Turner & Townsend’s ambition is that the tool will allow it to create a database of global benchmarks and best practice.

UK managing director Patricia Moore said: “As the industry commits to meeting net zero, we see a fundamental shift in the role of the cost manager to now control and account for the two currencies of construction – cost and carbon.  Through the creation of our new embodied carbon calculator, we can ensure that there is clear integration of these priorities on our clients’ projects.

”The investment we have made in our digital capability has enabled us to build an application that can provide consistent and accurate assessments of a project’s embodied carbon count from an early design stage. This will play a vital part in our clients’ journey towards a robust, measurable net zero ambition. Unlocking innovation like this is key to ensuring that our industry is part of the solution to tackling the pressing social, environmental and economic challenges we face.”

The tool is endorsed by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), whose senior specialist Matthew Collins said: “Turner & Townsend’s embodied carbon calculator is exactly what the industry needs to help bring the impacts of embodied carbon to the forefront of discussions with clients and end users. Enabling the embodied carbon of project designs, across all stages, to be measured in accordance with the RICS professional statement in whole life carbon assessment and reported in a consistent way, will allow more informed decisions to be made with respect to cost and carbon. This will help achieve the governmental targets around net zero which have been set both nationally and internationally.”

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