Meaningful measurement for whole-life carbon in infrastructure: a report from The Carbon Project

Summary

Some 70% of carbon emissions worldwide can be linked to infrastructure. Civil engineers, as the designers, builders and maintainers of this infrastructure, have a duty to minimise the harmful impacts on our climate by understanding and reducing the whole-life carbon in infrastructure.

Measuring, sharing and benchmarking of carbon impacts – covering all stages of the infrastructure lifecycle – is integral to facilitating carbon management as a routine aspect of infrastructure design. This paper, which has been devised and produced by a panel of industry experts as part of the Institution of Civil Engineers’ The Carbon Project, seeks to demonstrate to designers of our infrastructure assets a consistent methodology for how they can successfully measure, share and benchmark carbon impacts.