Full Transparency: Scope 3 emissions and Project Portfolio Disclosure  

Ben Hopkins from Bennett's Associates explains how reporting project emissions alongside Scope 3 emission reports is crucial in increasing transparency and reaching Net Zero Targets.
Embodied Carbon database workshop

Projects and designers’ Scope 3 emissions have long been a thorny subject within the industry, exemplified by the AJ roundtable on the subject last year, and the response to it. At Bennett’s Associates, we have been reporting Scope 3 emissions for around a decade, and in 2021 made the decision to start reporting projects alongside it to make it clear we understood that we had a responsibility for their emissions.  

Up until now, however, that has been done as a single large number which comes with many challenges. One of those is emissions from projects that naturally dwarf other emissions within the business footprint, and can potentially lead to inaction on that side of the business when we need to be tackling both. Most challenging though, is that the number often varies so wildly year by year that we have seen some years where it was around four hundred times larger than the rest of our business footprint and other years where it was only twice as large.  

Reporting absolute numbers is therefore more a function of how much has been completed, rather than the projects’ carbon impact, and even then, for architects where our designs take many years to be realised, this is often a measure of how we were doing a long time ago rather than our current performance. As such we decided to dramatically change how we were reporting to capture as much about our work as possible and put it all in the public domain. Fortunately, at the same time as this was being considered, the UKGBC were thinking about the same issues and were coming to similar conclusions about the need for effective project reporting. 

Our strategy for reporting is very simple. It starts by listing every project between the end of RIBA Stage 3 (Spatial Coordination, in between Concept and Technical Design) and practical completion for the previous year. Some projects are anonymised to streamline the disclosure, but we hope the number of anonymised projects will reduce over time. Each project is then described in terms of the extent of works so that numbers can be contextualised, as there is nothing more frustrating than seeing a low upfront carbon number and then finding out after lots of digging that it is only a fit-out. 

After that we provide the upfront carbon for each project, along with a downloadable sheet which sets out the breakdown (because again, there’s nothing more annoying than a low or high number that you can’t dig into). There are some older legacy projects that don’t have calculations, which we are hoping to get around to, but in the meantime rather than excluding them we are providing conservative benchmarks based on LETI/GLA business as usual figures.  

Naturally, calculating the emissions is the most intensive part of the reporting. Only dealing with upfront carbon helps, but even taking into account that around half of our projects have external consultants on board to do carbon reporting, filling the gaps even where we are not being paid to do the calculations has been no small feat.  

As we are reporting upfront carbon, which does not include biogenic carbon, we report sequestration separately as we believe that this is an important metric to keep track of. Furthermore, as we are starting to see projects come forward with rapidly sequestering materials like straw, we are reporting this separately and hope this will increase over time. 

Rating Tool Forum

Though we think we’re one of, if not the first, architects to follow UKGBC’s guidance, our work is certainly not done. Once the UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard is released, we will be adding benchmarks to each project so it’s clear how we’re performing against industry standards, and we will be aiming to add operational energy in coming years as more and more projects are undertaking predictive energy assessments. 

Right now, the disclosure forms a great snapshot in time, showing a mix of older projects that typically have higher(ish) upfront carbon, many re-use and retrofit projects, a few ambitious new-build projects and everything in between. We feel that added transparency will help us stay on track to our 2030 targets and, for a practice with broad ambition, it also contextualises our best projects as one of many, rather than the odd one out. 

As an industry we collectively need to take responsibility (if not ownership) of project emissions, and the UKGBC guidance provides an effective way of doing this. We hope that by publishing our portfolio we are encouraging others to do the same. 

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