A targeted approach to the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

In this intriguing talk hosted by The Institution of Structural Engineers, the speaker discusses the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their relevance and application in the field of structural engineering. The speaker, candidly admitting their initial lack of SDG knowledge, delves into their importance, explaining how structural engineers can significantly impact these goals, especially concerning climate change and sustainability. Emphasis is placed on minimizing carbon footprints through innovative solutions and collaboration across the engineering and architectural sectors. With real-world examples, the speaker illustrates the crucial role structural engineers play in a sustainable future, offering practical advice and advocating for a focus on impactful, sustainable practices.

Highlights

The speaker wasn't initially an SDG expert but stresses the universal understanding engineers can have 🎓.
Five million people contributed to the creation of the SDGs; every country has agreed to them 🌍.
The SDGs are aimed at eradicating poverty by dealing with interrelated issues like climate change and inequality 🌱.
There's significant carbon emission from the construction industry; structural engineers can significantly mitigate this 🌆.
Advocating for the use of local materials is a priority to address climate challenges locally and globally 🚜.

Key Takeaways

Every structural engineer can contribute to sustainable practices by understanding and implementing the UN SDGs 🌍.
Structural engineering plays a pivotal role in reducing global carbon emissions, a significant part of the climate solution 🌱.
Collaborations with architects and other professionals enhance opportunities to align with sustainable goals 🤝.
Building less, reusing materials, and ensuring efficient designs are essential for future sustainability in construction 🏗️.
Incorporating sustainability into professional choices is far more impactful than everyday personal habits 🍃.

Overview

This insightful lecture by The Institution of Structural Engineers underscores the importance of the UN SDGs in engineering. The speaker shares their experience and revelations about integrating these goals into their professional life to create a meaningful impact.

Focusing on sustainability, the lecture covers the influence of structural engineers in achieving the SDGs. Topics include reducing construction emissions, reusing materials, and collaborating effectively with architects for better outcomes.

The talk concludes with the call to action for individual engineers to recognize their roles not just as technical professionals but as pivotal players in the global sustainability movement. Engineers are encouraged to see beyond technical specs to broader environmental and social impacts.

Chapters

00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Speaker Background The speaker humbly admits they are not an expert in SDGs or sustainability, identifying themselves as a structural engineer eager to make a positive impact. Initially anxious about addressing the board and council on these topics, they invested time to better understand the subject matter.
01:30 - 04:00: Overview of SDGs and Their Importance This chapter serves as an overview of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their significance. It includes insights from various knowledgeable individuals on the topic of sustainability. The speaker aims to condense this information into a 30-minute presentation, highlighting ways to improve understanding and implementation of the SDGs. The chapter invites audience engagement and is structured to offer a concise yet comprehensive nutshell of crucial ideas surrounding sustainable development.
04:00 - 07:00: Interconnectedness of SDGs The chapter titled 'Interconnectedness of SDGs' provides a brief overview of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to help those unfamiliar with the subject gain an understanding of them. It discusses the relationships between the SDGs, particularly focusing on the current climate emergency, and offers examples of how changes in work practices can have both global and local impacts in alignment with the SDGs. The chapter starts by examining the importance of the SDGs from a global perspective.
07:00 - 13:30: Climate Change and Its Global Impact The chapter discusses the global collaborative effort involved in establishing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with about 5 million contributors from around the world. All countries have committed to these goals, which encompass 17 primary objectives subdivided into numerous targets. On average, each goal has around 10 targets, totaling approximately 169, most of which are ambitious and quantifiable. The chapter emphasizes the significance of these targets in driving global change.
13:30 - 18:00: Role of Structural Engineers in Addressing Climate Change This chapter discusses the role of structural engineers in addressing climate change, with a focus on global targets to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although specific targets and indicators are not detailed, the chapter emphasizes the relevance of these goals to currently active engineers, highlighting the urgency and importance of contributing to climate change solutions within the next decade.
18:00 - 29:00: Strategies for Sustainable Development in Engineering The chapter discusses how progress in sustainable development in engineering can be tracked using various indicators tied to specific goals and targets. It highlights useful resources such as websites and dashboards, which aggregate data from organizations like the World Bank, UNICEF, and WHO, to provide insights and comparisons. These tools help in understanding how well sustainable development goals are being met.
29:00 - 40:00: Local Impact and Social Responsibility in Engineering The chapter discusses the utilization of data to assess how countries are progressing towards their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically focusing on responsible consumption. It highlights that green indicators signify that a country is on track to meet its goal by 2030. However, there is a notable disparity, as many developed nations are performing well in this area, prompting reflection on these differences. The chapter also introduces an app called 'SDGs in Action,' which is designed to aid in understanding and tracking the progress of countries towards achieving their SDGs.
40:00 - 42:00: Conclusion and Key Takeaways The chapter discusses the availability of an application on both Apple and Android platforms that provides snippets of information related to different goals and targets. This app can be particularly useful for individuals preparing for talks or presentations, as it allows them to quickly brush up on relevant facts. The chapter also highlights an important aspect of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), pointing out that all 17 goals are ultimately centered around a key goal represented by SDG1.

A targeted approach to the UN Sustainable Development Goals Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 thanks David I'm actually gonna go back on what you just said I'm not an expert in the SDGs or sustainability I am just a structure engineer who wants to do good things with his work and so when I was asked to speak to the board and the council in July about this topic obviously I was very happy to do so and thought it sound like a great idea but then immediately started a panic when I realized how little actually knew about this so I spent the preceding weeks
00:30 - 01:00 making a complete inducers to myself finally officer develop chasing up all people who did know lots of things about the SDGs and about sustainability and try to sort of pull things together into a 30 minute nutshell of what I think we can we can do better and hopefully this will give you a bit of that tonight people who sat right in the back if you can't see my beard well enough from there there's actually quite a lot of chairs down here at the front so if anyone does want to move please feel free so yeah tonight I'm gonna give a
01:00 - 01:30 brief overview of what the SDGs are in a way that hopefully will help those who don't recognize them understand them talk about their relationships that the climate emergency that's you know pretty hot topic at the moment excuse the pun and give some examples of how we might change the way we work to have an impact both globally and locally that aligns with the SDGs so let's start by looking at the SDGs themselves these are really important this is a global view of what
01:30 - 02:00 a better world looks like about 5 million people contributed to writing the UN SDGs and every country in the world has signed up to them each of those 17 goals that you just saw will come back to them it's split into a number of targets there is on average about 10 targets per goal thing there's 169 or something in total and they're typically very ambitious and most of them are quantifiable so you can see from Target at one point one time at one
02:00 - 02:30 point one is to eradicate extreme poverty from the world in its entirety by the year 2030 and all of these targets have the year 2030 as a cutoff deadline so that's only 10 years away from now I don't expect many of us or any of us will have been retired by that point so these are pretty relevant to us I'm not going to go into targets and indicators tonight which is how the targets are tracked but I just thought I'd put this on to help you understand more by the SDGs these indicators have been sort of
02:30 - 03:00 assembled to help us see how we're getting on basically so for each goal there's a bunch of targets and free to target as a bunch of indicators and if we look at the indicators we know how we're getting on this website it's quite good if you're interested to see how people are doing I'm gonna put a list of all the web links and stuff up at the very end of this so you don't have to worry too much if you miss them this website dashboards are sthg index takes data from sources like the World Bank UNICEF WH o and it compares
03:00 - 03:30 that data to these indicators to try and work out how countries are getting on green means that the country is on track to meet their particular goal that you've clicked on by the year 2030 and so it might come as little surprise to see that most of this so-called developed world is painted quite vet in terms of responsible consumption but I'm leave that to you think about this app is also quite good SDGs in action this
03:30 - 04:00 exists on Apple and Android and gives lots of like you know snippets of information match the different goals and targets quite a good thing to get on your phone the night before you're giving a talk in the ice-truck sea for example and you want to brush up on some facts so back to the 17 goals themselves the first thing that's worth knowing is that all 17 goals are kind of written they just exist for this one goal in the top left-hand corner sd1 so the SDGs
04:00 - 04:30 were written basically to eradicate poverty and they all feed back to that and the point is that you can't eradicate poverty without solving ongoing food crises and without ensuring that cities of resilience the effects of climate change it also acknowledges that the goals are interrelated to each other so they go beyond this and to give you a couple of examples in order to end poverty we need to ensure decent work for people but we can't do that if we don't reduce inequalities and one of the
04:30 - 05:00 ways in which you can reduce inequalities is to end poverty so you see this sort of while the confusing cycle happens something a bit more firmly rooted in the built environment if we want to end poverty we need to ensure that cities are resilient and one of the things we need to do in order to make sure they stay resilient in the future is to tackle the climate crisis otherwise we're just going to have to upgrade everything again and again and again over the next few centuries and one of the targets within SDG 11 sustainable cities talks about
05:00 - 05:30 enabling developing nations to build more things out of locally sourced materials which is in an effort to tackle the climate crisis so again you can see there's lots of sort of interplay between these goals so you got these 17 really interrelated overlapping goals covers a huge range of topics and can be ridiculously confusing the first time you look at it so I find it easier to try and group them because I like to do things with fat pennzoil and thin pants and the way I group them to help
05:30 - 06:00 me think about it is like this there's lots of other ways that people have done this I've seen all kind of diagrams with sea sores and stuff like that on the top left I stick the goals that I think impact people's lives directly bring people out of poverty keep them healthy well-fed etc on the top right you've got the goals that focus on creating a society that people want to live in so one of them my transparency institutions where inequality is a thing in the past at the bottom you've then on the Left got the
06:00 - 06:30 goals that deal with the 21 do the the impact that's been done to this planet over the last 100 150 years and in the bottom right you've got these sort of built environment goals that try and tackle what we're doing now to reduce the amount of impact we have in the future as we go forward and then finally in the middle of it all you've got SDG 17 which is I sort of you know binds everything else together this is all about collaboration this is like SDG inception seeing this goals entitled partnership with the goals so this is
06:30 - 07:00 about you know if we work closely with architects and quantity surveyors and the MEP engineers and help them achieve the goals that they've set out then everyone's impact should be larger than if we also to work in individual silos and to me those goals at the top are the ones where we will probably have most sort of local impacts in our work by creating a society around us that's fair and people have an OK in it and the goals at the bottom reach much further and their impacts are felt by the entire
07:00 - 07:30 planet so whilst I am going to touch on diversity and poverty and things like that seasoning I'm mostly going to focus on these global impact goals at the bottom if that's ok with people yeah good ok cool so you say yes because I don't have a second set of slides for you so now so before we dive into any of these goals we need to remind ourselves as to why these global impact goals of importance and there's three things to
07:30 - 08:00 reiterate on this topic that I'm sure you've all seen a lot about recently so number one there is a problem and people are starting to agree this is quite a big deal you don't have to be a sustainable as the expert to see that people start to talk about this more and more there were four million children striking last Friday in the hope that you know grown-ups will do something about this climate changes how to be branding it's now the climate emergency and people are sort of green maybe we should step up our game of it a reminder
08:00 - 08:30 of the science for people who didn't pay attention to geography or history I guess maybe science you know the earth beneath us is full of carbon we spent the last 150 years digging it up putting us into the atmosphere this planet's amazing it's full of plants in the sea and on the land that absorb it but we don't have enough plants to keep up with what we're putting up there so the last century or so the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has gone up and up and with its temperature levels have risen and we're currently at about one degree warmer than we were three industrialization levels so in terms of
08:30 - 09:00 what that means in terms of what this global warming means there's books like this they give a fantastic overview and by fantastic I guess I mean poets like this so this book by Davis Wallace wells summarizes the sort of Cohen understanding of scientists around the world there's about 700 or so references in here and there's summary is that if we don't do anything by the end of this century and potentially none of us will be essentially but all of our kids will be
09:00 - 09:30 by the end of this century there'll be four or five degrees temperature rise versus pre-industrial levels and that doesn't just mean will be a bit warmer in winter that means that the south of Europe will be in permanent droughts it means that flooding damage in the UK will be about 60 times as bad as it is today and it means that there will be potentially global food deficit where the world but you know the planets can't produce enough calories to sustain the number of people who live on it so this is all pretty dramatic stuff and it's
09:30 - 10:00 not a far-off future these are predictions happening within our lifetime in the lifetimes of our kids so movements like such engineer's declare architects declare and the like have all started to happen recently as people have started to wake up to this maybe being something we should do something about and whilst these declare movements are great because you know we're asking people like the UN and our government do something about this I think most of us are here tonight because we're thinking how can we personally do something about
10:00 - 10:30 this in our work not rather than just waiting for somebody else to impose and new laws and also something on the structure engineer is clear movement this is a list as of Friday all the firms that had signed up to that movement please have a quick look to see if your firms on there and if it's not feel free to ignore me for the next 30 seconds email your boss and ask him or her why you haven't signed up to this if your name does appear on here then you can take these 30 seconds to reflect on what you should now be doing with your jobs which includes raising awareness of
10:30 - 11:00 the urgent need for change advocating for faster industry change including carbon counseling and everything we do everything choosing reuse over new bills wherever possible and minimizing waste and presumably you've all been doing that all day so I don't need to say any more about those topics but maybe there is still a bit of room for improvement here in there it's also worth looking at the architect's declare website because most of our collaborators and clients have
11:00 - 11:30 probably signed up to this and if you go on there and you look at what they've pledged to do the next time you want to make the argument for a nice deep sustainably sourced beam so it's sustainably sized you could remind them of what they're supposed to be doing and you can say well look like this is far more efficient aren't you meant to be caring about efficiency now yeah so that's what it's quite look as well it's pretty similar to their engineer's declare site so if we do nothing 4 to 5 degrees see global warming that sounds bad so what
11:30 - 12:00 targets have you say it's a couple of really important things have happened in about the past year number one who is it scientists at the IPCC reached agreement that's global warming beyond about one and a half degrees and remember we're already at one so the on one and a half will be extreme and hard control and they made this statement which is the only way we're going to you know make sure we stick within one and a half degrees as if rapid far-reaching and unprecedented changes happen which all
12:00 - 12:30 sounds pretty scary right off the back of this the UK government has announced that this country will be net carbon neutral by the year 2050 and there are now people talking about where this could happen sooner but whether it's 2050 2040 whatever the point of this is that regardless of whether people believe the science or not and believe whether this is human induced or not this is just going to become law so carbon counseling energy reporting caring about the environment will just become law we'll have to do it regardless so it becomes a bit futile making trying to making arguments as to
12:30 - 13:00 whether this is due to the sudden heat Singapore was pumping carbon to the atmosphere so number one the we agree there's a problem we don't like the sound of what'll happen if this continues to get worse and we now have some limits we need to wait for number two it's worth knowing that structural engineers actually have quite a lots of power to do something about this you might have seen this number before nearly 40% of global energy related carbon emissions come from buildings in construction so this industry is bloody
13:00 - 13:30 massive right back in that years and years ago in use energy used to be the main bulk of the problem but nowadays the balance has shifted as I only pee mates have been using more and more sustainable designs and embodied carbon is now the primary contributor or will soon become the primary contributor to the whole life carbon footprint of a building and what makes up most of the embodied energy its us sign this roof so most of this is substructure superstructure and relevant
13:30 - 14:00 construction emissions so we are the biggest bit of the biggest bit of a very big bit of a really big problem and it's amazing we don't have you know the extinction rebellion or whoever camped outside demand and we do something about this this is fantastic this is brilliant because this means we can make a really big difference with our work and enact a change it's far bigger than what our friends are going to enact by taking a reusable cut Starbucks this is great this is a big opportunity for us and
14:00 - 14:30 this is a good time to be talking about it so right now sustainability is really sexy sexy enough to convince people to change their diets to reduce the amount of air travel they take microsites say their own mug out with them when they go to get a coffee in the morning but for perspective skipping that cross Atlantic flight is gonna save one ton of carbon sounds kind of big wantin if you cut meat dairy and I hate save a beer out of your diet for an entire year that's two tonnes and if you somehow managed to convince your family to ditch the car
14:30 - 15:00 walk everywhere for the next year that's maybe it's something like three tonnes unless you have a Prius although I guess for comparison a new housing developments or maybe a new skyscraper in the middle of a city is going to be somewhere in the region of 10,000 to 100,000 tons of carbon Google's new headquarters here in London has got something like 25 thousand cubic meters of concrete going into it which is and 12,000 tons of steel which gives you something like 30,000 tons of carbon the
15:00 - 15:30 cheese graters another 20,000 tonnes right at the upper end of the scale if you look at the Burj Khalifa by my back around Volokh calculated on the train on the way down this afternoon I reckon looking at about a quarter of a million tons of carbon in the structure alone I'm not giving these numbers to make judgments these buildings have all been designed by world-class engineers and a probably pretty efficient the point I'm making is that the numbers we're dealing with in our industry are astronomical compared to these other numbers if you look at how much building
15:30 - 16:00 space you designed last year you know you take the projects you and your team have worked on added up divided by the number of people on the team you I come up with I don't know some like 5000 square meters per year more or less for example an average carbon footprint for structure might be in the realms of 200 kilos per square meter so that means per year you're responsible for about a thousand tons that's a pretty big responsibility right that means that if you can do things 20% better you save
16:00 - 16:30 200 tons of carbon and that's quite a big difference so if there's only one thing you take away with you and you tell other people about after this evening it's this the effects we can have with our professional choices are just orders of magnitude bigger than what we can have with our personal choices and I don't think everyone in this industry realizes this and I don't think most of our clients do either I'll client some really good people they you know they generally want to do good things they probably will take their own
16:30 - 17:00 mud Starbucks but I think if they knew about this there might be other ways we have conversations with them going forwards obviously by the way do both not just one of the other things except the beer thing you know so there's a problem we can do a loss about it but number three we need to do things really differently that's the radical unprecedented change bit and so now that we agree the magnitude of this responsibility we have let's head back to the SDGs to talk about how we can do
17:00 - 17:30 this and clearly it goes without saying that these are all things we should be doing whether the SDGs exists or not it's just quite a nice framework to talk about things then it helps us communicate with people outside of our industry and it gives us a sort of you know boxes to put ideas into as we focus on them so let's go out to these global impact goals with the ultimate goal of trying to hit that one and a half to be limit set by the IPCC this report which was published by c40 an hour earlier this year was written by a bunch of
17:30 - 18:00 people who tries to do exactly that they said what do we have to do in the c40 cities of the world if we're going to hit one and a half degrees C or less so they've done all the hard work for us and you can find this by the way if you just google c40 urban consumption then worth now what we have to do they put this one snazzy little table in on about page 70 somewhere in amongst everything else and I'm not going to read it all out but a couple of the highlights that it states that by 2030 we need to reduce our cement usage by 56% we need to build
18:00 - 18:30 90% of all new residential products timber and we need to ensure that 20% of all building projects just 20% of all they've become reused reefer projects while the new bills so this is your dramatic unprecedented IPCC change and you can see that they mostly fit into a handful of STDs so if we just do all that you know easy they're pretty ambitious I don't think any of this is new the kids in my wife's
18:30 - 19:00 school basically came up with the same concept when put together for now we just need to apply it to the building industry instead of you know cartons of milk and stuff so my interpretation of that table and that green poster looks a bit like this where plan arrey going forward just needs to be that we build less stuff plan B if plan a fails is you reuse whatever you've already got in some form another and Plan C if you absolutely must build something new from scratch you do it efficiently with low carbon materials and whilst they're stuck in SDG 12 stick on here you know
19:00 - 19:30 this is going to be a mixture of SDGs nine eleven and twelve which is industry and innovation sustainable cities and responsible consumption so it's just three STDs so let's go through each of them briefly so plan a build less stuff that's c4 see of course I mentioned it said one in five building four dates need to become reuse I can't show you an image of this which is a shame because it's brilliant but this is a project that our we're working on that's currently in planning where the client basically said show me a reused version
19:30 - 20:00 of this project where I reused the 30 storey tower currently on the sites and show me a new build project and tell me the differences and we're able to explain that it would have half the impact if they picked the reuse projects the reuse option and they went with it you know not just because of the soy that this tells but in part because on the soil is tells they see that that adds value to their projects and they get excited about it and they think they can sell that so people are going to less office space for them they do like this stuff so that sounds great with a
20:00 - 20:30 client after it but what can you do in your work tomorrow if they're not asking for I'm gonna put up a few of these gray slides and it's basically a bunch of ideas that me and other people in my team have come up with over the past couple of weeks trying to view start of attempts so I should give them some credit as well but if this is by no means exhaustive and it's just the ideas of a few engineers number one I think is just start looking at reuse when you can't write so if you got competition entry treat it as a opportunity to maybe consider what you could do that the
20:30 - 21:00 client hasn't thought of could you keep the basements even if you are gonna demolish the superstructure could you keep the foundations even if you are in demolish the basement show it to them do the carbon calx comments and explain to them what the difference is in terms of you know number of forests that are effectively cutting down and then talk about the benefits of it with the building owner explain to them how in 10-15 years time you know it's going to be the norm that a building has been designed sustainably so if they're still you know knocking things down and
21:00 - 21:30 building from scratch they're gonna look like dinosaurs talk about it with them just be honest with them by the way how many people in this room feel comfortable doing it back remember low carbon calc on a structure yeah okay so for people online there's about four hands in the air and there's way more than four people at this lecture in this room so it looks a bit like this and it's really easy after this talk one of the links I'm going to put it up is to a thing called the IC e database which is
21:30 - 22:00 basically a bunch of numbers that have been assembled by people at a company called circular ecology and bath University where basically for each building material they've said there's this many kilos of carbon for that many kilos of c30 concrete this many kills are common for that many kilos of CLT timber their UK specific but there were similar databases out there for other countries around the world you can get hold of them I used to just write these down on a post-it note on my desk they just said concrete rebar steel
22:00 - 22:30 brick timber and that's kind of all you really need you only really need four or five numbers and then you can do this stuff really quickly and you can say well option B looks to be 30% lower carbon an opportunity we're not quite sure the number so it could be 10% it could be 50% well we think it's probably the right thing to do and I think we're all in agreement at least within my team then we need to do this more often and just get better at it because we don't do it often enough we sit there work out what's cheaper for our clients because we know how much steel cost per ton but
22:30 - 23:00 we don't always wear this out straight away so we should real easy then reuse in the future let's assume that you do have to build something today that's new or whatever thinking forward to enabling people to reuse stuff later on I think we can maximize the chances of that by creating you know beautiful holistically designed but most importantly well detailed structures that won't this last 50 years their last 150 years you know timber that's not rotting and steel that's not busting we'll give you the best chance to keeping it up there having sensible spans grades opening
23:00 - 23:30 sizes that will help future flexibility means that hopefully your structure will stay through the rest of your lifetime and keeping good records is obviously key people who have worked on existing building jobs know the worst bit is usually trying to work out what was built in the first place so if you only write three things down I suggest it's probably where the rebar is what the material is he made it out of and what the loading assumptions were in the first place and they'll just make everyone's life easier so plan a keep it if you can keep it don't knock it down
23:30 - 24:00 and build something new plan B if you do have to build something new how can we enable the reuse of components when we do build that new thing so that C forty table talks about again one in five building components getting reused on top of the one in five refurb projects this this idea is what people have been referred to as the circular economy for a while for people who haven't heard the term which is the idea of keeping products just in the supply chain again and again and again so not getting something new using it throwing away but
24:00 - 24:30 seeing if you can reuse them and this is something we've been looking at for a few years now we built this building outside the building Center about three years ago we named it the circular building which confuse a lot of people because it's square on plan and even end on it's triangles as if in it but this was a prototype house built out of components in the material that came straight off an existing production line was put up for a few weeks or months and then went straight back home to the Berkshire line and we're since reuse we manufactured it recycled we had to work
24:30 - 25:00 closely with likely adaptors to make little clamping connections for the facade we actually had to change the damage in the building because all the steel was offcuts from the production line they said well these are the links we've got but it turns out you can change dimensions of buildings because you all fantastic engineer so you can deal with changing stuff so that was fine and after it was disassembled the steel just went straight back to people who gave it to us so we want to do this more we want to do this on bigger projects I don't think you can do design for deconstruction on everything I think
25:00 - 25:30 that's generally accepted that a lot of geometries don't work with it but if you've got a really repetitive building anyway like a long span roof or a big repetitive office building you know why not maximize that you make all the grids as identical as you can you try and use the same beam size again and again and again maybe you do that at the expense of a bit of efficiency for now so you've got a hundred beams all 10 metres long all the same size that becomes a bit more like a shopping list of beams to sell in a hundred years time think about
25:30 - 26:00 the connections so we're not using composite stuff we don't like wells and glue and shear studs but we like bolts and we like screws so we can undo stuff and then again keep good records and people I'm yet seen anyone do this but I guess the idea would be you write some kind of deconstruction plan then you put it in the O&M manual that just says undo this bit first then this bit don't weld this off if you want to add some capacity to that that sort of thing okay and then Plan C absolutely last option
26:00 - 26:30 if everything else fails if you really have to knock it down and you can't save any of it because it's crap and you have to build something new from scratch we need to get better at doing this more efficiently so there's research that shows that we are making incredibly inefficient structures and whether you believe the 50% figure or not I think we can probably all agree there's a bit of fat in our designs from time to time or at least you know that the design of the engineer sat next to me obviously my design would never be that bad cetera but we all know there's extra material out there because they
26:30 - 27:00 were incentives to keep it it might build ability the arcs that's going to change something at the last minute what they build it a bit wrong all that we need to start convincing our colleagues to change their minds on this people would like to have the safety blanket of its spare capacity in there but that's what things like load factors are for right if you got the maximum load out the code and you put a load factor on top of it that's as much load as your search you should ever seek so there's no real reason not to design that so 100
27:00 - 27:30 percent on the dot so to be delivering CD with like 90% capacity is just a bit silly really on top of that with codified loads there are some people now suggesting that maybe in what's in the code is you know completely unrealistic so 5 kPa you will have to get into the call of the room put your hands in the air and stand next to each other and people are designing offices so this 5 K PA plus an extra 50% which is your new or less such the safety you got to physically take people and put them on top of those people who've got their
27:30 - 28:00 arms in the air it's just I mean it's not gonna happen is it's insane so the very least we should be aiming to design for 100% of this definitely you know no sky passing arguably maybe less and the work of people like my Khan is doing really good things like questioning this and I hope this is going to change things as we go forward you know better still obviously we should be designing the structure efficient efficiently once we've got this layout set but even better would be to agree earlier on with the architects
28:00 - 28:30 then we're gonna assess and ambitious targets and we're going to arrange a structure in a nice efficient way because if all of that embodied energy in the building mostly comes from the structure it would probably make sense to let the structure dictate where things go a bit more readily so we won the competition to design this tower in Taipei which has got some of the highest seismic and typhoon loads in the world because we basically said to the architects in the client we reckon we can do that for two thirds of the steel of this number that you're quoting as being sort of typical and the architect
28:30 - 29:00 loved this idea they went with it they said how do we do that what what does the arrangement of the tower looks like and so this is a structure or a building so that's entirely driven by structural efficiency and there was as a result we might have saved something like 40,000 tonnes of carbon or something there's probably you know 50 or 60,000 tonnes of carbon in the structure but that could be a hundred so these are the sort of numbers we want to be doing I think it's fair to say to my boss who convinced the architect to go with this smashed his 200 tonnes figure out the park that year
29:00 - 29:30 and probably go home and eat all the red meat he wanted for Christmas so efficient design early collaboration sitting down with the architects saying hey you signed up to that website didn't either declare one yeah I've got some ideas you know agree that with them and then remind them of that as you go through the design process calculate the embodied carbon as we go along how they go in it's much really easy and then finally try and find some time to optimize the design people outside of our vendors do you think it's nuts that we get to the end of the CD we rush it and get out the door and we don't go
29:30 - 30:00 back in it and try and see if we could trim some more material out of it maybe consider asking the client to pay you to do it for a month on the basis you'll probably save there more money than it will cost them to let you do it a word of warning I was asked to say by people who do Expo witness type work they all tell me that they see too many buildings that are only stood up because they've got that fat still in it so if you are gonna do that extra bit of optimization maybe do a bit of extra checking at the same time just taking
30:00 - 30:30 you know let's get it right as well as efficient but then as well as efficiency in terms of the amount of material let's start questioning the material in the first place this is a pretty extreme example and I'm not suggesting you should all start building skyscrapers that a mud blocks but when we did this products in Rwanda we created a million earth blocks out of soil that we literally dug up off the ground just behind this photo and we created about 17,000 square meters of education space this had a carbon footprint for the
30:30 - 31:00 total thing including the fired bricks so I filed tiles on the roof and the glass and the windows of about 200 kilos of carbon per square meter which is less than half of what a typical education projects here in the UK would have and is in the sort of realms of what you'd expect the structure alone to be so this was this was a pretty cool thing to have done I'm not suggesting you can use earth bricks everywhere but sustainably sourced timber is pretty damn available
31:00 - 31:30 now I'd say and there's a little reason why we should be building residential projects out of anything other than CLT to be completely honest and you know the moves of most buildings would probably be timber as well also that's it this should be sustainably sourced let's be clear but that's pretty easy to get hold on at least in the UK other things on materials presumably you're all using recycled aggregate and cement replacements in all of your mixes but we should be keeping an eye out for things like SEM 3 and stuff as they develop and
31:30 - 32:00 we get closer and closer to 100% Cement replacement concrete's because until we do something about concrete we're still going to be sort of chasing your tail a bit and we should take the liberty to make demands of our supply chain why not you got tenderers contractors tendering for a project why not put in the questionnaire questions about where a young CEO is going to come from what's the embodied carbon in your concrete ask them for the environmental product declarations just make them do extra work it's fine they do all this stuff for free at the start don't write and then you can hold them to it later on
32:00 - 32:30 which is great warning on this one is the timber thing and this is a bugbear of mine as soon as you know timbers not some magical carbon negative or carbon neutral materials that you can just you know privilege throw at everything it does have a net carbon emission into the atmosphere by the time you've taken down the building and birds it for energy or put it into landfill and the environmental product declarations of all the manufacturers agree with that but having said that that number is usually low enough that if you use it
32:30 - 33:00 properly in the right buildings so things like cellular resi buildings things like hotels stuff like that it usually comes out as a better option the good news is you don't have to take my word for it you can just do the carbon calc for it because you can you go down those numbers I put on the screen before so you can go away and have a go but yeah the point is you know quantifiably we need to check things whether that's assuming so we're going to apply a seismic furbish Minh we're going to reuse bits of existing structure and design it so they can take it down the future and reuse it and we're going to
33:00 - 33:30 sharpen our pencils configure things properly use low carbon materials all good stuff whilst we're doing all of that I also think you know SD g17 is the most important next thing we could be doing right so this is about partnering with our collaborators so that they can design buildings that are accessible buildings that use clean water and clean energy and all these good things but it's also about for those of us who do overseas projects helping to know
33:30 - 34:00 share with the people we work in work with in other countries because this country has actually got a really small carbon footprint when you compare it to the rest of the world it's like 1% of global carbon emissions from the UK or something you might think that that's insignificant they thought there's no point of doing this but we're basically like the R&D hothouse for the rest of the world right so we might as well figure out how to do this stuff and then next time you build a project in India and you're speaking to the local engineers you say hey have you heard about this 200 ton thing that we'll all don't mention and they go no probably not
34:00 - 34:30 but you know we can help other people learn from this and then our impacts get bigger and bigger so this is one of my favorite projects I wish that I was able to it works on this is in Bangladesh and you've probably heard of the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013 which killed about 1200 people when it just collapsed we were asked if we would design and sort of write an air a structural safety assessment methodology all of the other buildings in Bangladesh that made ready
34:30 - 35:00 declare ready to wear garden soil and we wrote the methodology we went out to Bangladesh and we inspected about 800 or so factories which was great more importantly we trained up local engineers in Bangladesh on how to use this methodology which meant they could then go out and assess another 3,000 factories on top of that so the impact of those people had who had written the methodology all the sudden got some like quadrupled off the back of sharing that knowledge and hopefully will have changed the way that you know those
35:00 - 35:30 engineers out there consider building design the future which will have further and further impacts that's good so that's that's the longest bit that's all you'll be pleased to know but the global impact goals I argue are the the biggest and most important thing we should be thinking about now on our projects going to target future flexibility design for new construction all these things all swirls counting and tracking carbon and then we're going to knowledge share if we're doing this right no point in doing any of that if it's going to come at the expense of
35:30 - 36:00 people's equality the fairness of people's work in their health right and that's where the local impacts scg's come in so I'm just going to take last sort of four or five minutes to look at these and how they feed into that big picture so if the global impact goals are the sort of I guess where the outputs of our work has impact then the local impact goals I think are where the way that we work has impact so many people think that goals one's a four in
36:00 - 36:30 the top left which around poverty hunger health and education aren't really applicable to the so-called Western world but we're all quite used to seeing headlines like this so we probably all agree that there's work to be done on most of these goals we need to ask ourselves if we are really comfortable working for developers who are going to knock down entire communities of people's houses who have been in you know parts of cities for generations and ask them to go and live somewhere else maybe we should open our fee proposal essence by saying yeah we'd absolutely
36:30 - 37:00 love to do the work for you we're going to put in a very good fee and we're going to use timber obviously but only if the new developments include space for those communities maybe it's easier to say that sense to do it because I'm not in charge of anyone's you know jobs but we should and we all know that we should more like similarly is it ok to be undertaking work in parts of the world where people are going to die realizing the structures you designed probably not and should we require our
37:00 - 37:30 young engineers to be raising 2,200 pounds from their friends in order to go overseas disseminate that knowledge that they've learned and make differences to the most the least resilient communities in the world you know what could our ferns that people employ us what could they do more to support people like this this it this is actually discrimination because if Tim he didn't have friends who could cobble together 2,000 pounds she wouldn't have done this so I feel from certain backgrounds you just don't consider doing aw big so we should be
37:30 - 38:00 asking more of our employers to do more of this kind of stuff and we also have a responsibility to speak up against you know accent discrimination whether that's gender race sexuality this industry is still imbalanced in terms of the male-female split and the construction sector I believe has the worst gender balance of any sector in the UK and so no matter how hard people try to make you know positive choices you still have things like as bias which is going to lead to you
38:00 - 38:30 know natural sexism continued to occur in this industry earlier in this year there was a letter published that somebody had written in that was sexist and it caused uproar quite rightly so and I you know you can't help but wondering if the colleagues of the person who write that letter in had spoken to him more often and called him out for making sexist comments at work whether that would have been missing in the first place hopefully not that is our responsibility no one else's ultimately to tackle things like this and we can do it at the same time as
38:30 - 39:00 doing all of that 200 tons of Carmen's stuff because that's the easy bit right so what have we been doing an hour because I said I share some examples so we revamped our work experience program entirely recently we now offer I think it's about two-thirds of all of our work experience places go to kids who come in form social mobility foundation other charities in the area and local schools and we only save the other third for people who come in through sort of employee referral which is basically
39:00 - 39:30 just about encouraging people into engineering like a grassroots level regardless of their background because ultimately I would like to pick the best engineers out of hundreds on a population and not 50 so we thought that'd be a good thing to do we've also set up this inclusion diagram which I really like which is basically an internal email address you can send your views to whenever you experience inclusion or exclusion in the workplace and they then publish these anonymous things on an internal website which is
39:30 - 40:00 good for those of us who don't get to experience these issues on a day to day basis so there's a lot of us who probably think actually this isn't really a problem in my workplace I'm surrounded by great people I don't see anything happen I quite like this because it's it serves as a nice bit of a reminder that there's still work to do and there's lots of positives to always come out this as well so that was that was good so in addition to your global impact goals and your 200 tons of carbon and all that we can take a few fairly significant steps to align ourselves of these local impact goals as well type of
40:00 - 40:30 work that we turn down is maybe important positive work that strengthens the communities positive work that gives build as a safe environment to work in that's all good we should be more supportive I believe in terms of people who want to dedicate their time it's a community engagement projects and ultimately regardless of the project and how we're gonna go about doing it we should be trying to assemble strong diverse teams around us and giving up with other people the opportunities that we have been quite lucky to receive so far in our lives so
40:30 - 41:00 that's it really quick three slide recap because I'm going to remind you of three things so my talk was entitled a targeted approach the UN SDGs and hopefully you'll maybe agree with me that there were a few scg's that we can have a really big impact on and some other sort of supporting roles and so my three points number one is about picking your SDGs at the Sasebo projects so we have a process in our up now where we try to assess our projects against the
41:00 - 41:30 different STDs and identify two or three goals where we could really maximize our impact so maybe it's going to be pushing an agenda for reuse with the client because you think they've missed something maybe you're designing for deconstruction or maybe there's going to optimize the hell out of the really weird shaped building that the architect gave you but you're gonna pick it and then you're gonna push it to its limit and made the biggest impact you can with that want go aside in a born idea number two is really easy count carbon in
41:30 - 42:00 everything we do because ultimately if we don't reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere we're gonna get stuck and everything else we're doing go to a circular of ecology calm down load these numbers and have a go or give it to the grad who works for you and get them to have a go and then learn it's really easy and then number three and the most important one if you're only going to do one thing it's remember that impact you're having through your work and this order of magnitude difference between personal life and professional life talk
42:00 - 42:30 to other people about it talk to your clients about that your architects about it remind them that they're doing great things already by going vegan but they could do even greater things if they make the right decisions at work thank you for your time [Applause]