John Easton, head of Archial Sustainable Futures, the research, development and advice consultancy, will highlight a lack of skills as a key challenge to the construction sector at the launch of ICARB (the Initiative for Carbon Accounting) at Holyrood today.

The event will mark the formal transition from SCAG (Scottish Carbon Accounting Group) to ICRAB, a group of academics, politicians and consultants working to create a set of transparent, consistent and accurate rules for Carbon Accounting.

Mr Easton said: “My role as a Carbon Trust Advice consultant allows me to see firsthand where the challenges lie for the construction sector in delivering to the low carbon agenda at project level.

-- Advertisement --

“The main problem that we face is a lack of skills among traditionally experienced practitioners who do not have the knowledge and understanding about carbon counting with which we are equipping our new graduates and whose established thinking and methods limit the effectiveness of those new graduates whose work they manage and direct in daily practice.

“The lack of integrated working between disciplines within design teams is the other frequent cause of failure. The ‘design silos’ mentality still prevails."

“What we need more fundamentally, however, is to re-skill our design teams across the construction sector as a whole to understand CO2 as a currency with which to account for building construction and operation – and to do that far more quickly than reliance on emerging new graduates would do alone,” he added.

ICARB aims to provide a forum for the development of a consensually agreed language and rule book for carbon accounting that is relevant, complete, consistent, transparent and accurate and enables compatibility of approaches across sectors.

(GK)