Spotlight on Decarbonization
The impacts of climate change are being felt across the globe more than ever before—from flash floods and hurricanes to record-breaking heatwaves and hundreds of millions of acres of land burned by wildfires. In 2022 alone, the world experienced $360 billion worth of weather and climate disasters.1
These impacts go beyond the governmental and individual levels and are impacting organizations across the world. Increasingly, business leaders in industries like architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) and design and manufacturing (D&M) recognize a corporate responsibility to address sustainability issues—and also a business case for doing so.
Since organizations in these sectors are responsible for designing and making much of the modern world, they account for a significant share of the global carbon emissions contributing to climate change. However, this outsized influence also gives these industries an opportunity to make an outsized positive impact through decarbonization actions that reduce carbon dioxide emissions or remove them from the atmosphere. These practices—which include creating net-zero buildings, designing circular products, reducing construction waste, and driving sustainability as a priority across supply chains—could cut carbon emissions dramatically if adopted at scale across the AEC and D&M sectors.
But how important is sustainability to business leaders? What are some of the key barriers for companies that haven’t taken action? And more importantly, how can companies take meaningful steps to decarbonize their projects and operations?
This report seeks to answer these questions.
1. https://www.ajg.com/gallagherre/-/media/files/gallagher/gallagherre/gallagher-re-nat-cat-review-2022.pdf