Figure 8 – Cumulative embodied carbon over time with reference to typical project lifespans

(Credit: sbp)

CONCLUSIONS

Our climate is changing due to accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.
The construction industry is a major contributor to global emissions, and consequently engineers
will play a critical role in reducing emissions to limit the extent of climate change. By applying
behavioral insights principles from the EAST framework to the engineering design workflow,
sbp aims to promote design behavior to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and continues to plan
further interventions to the internal design workflow.
To robustly verify the effectiveness of these interventions would require trial and control groups
of engineers, and a comparison of carbon emission indicators between the projects produced by
these groups. This is beyond the capability of an office the size of sbp. However, sbp would
propose that a natural experiment could take place between different engineering practices
operating in a defined construction market, where carbon emission indicators could be compared
between practices that had adopted some of these sustainable design behavior interventions, and
those who had not. While sbp is unable to complete a statistically significant review of the
success of internal interventions, there is an intention to tangentially monitor the success of these
interventions by comparing the embodied carbon emissions from new projects completed after
the interventions were introduced, and historic projects completed before the interventions were
introduced.