Keith Clarke, CBE: Decarbonise At Speed. Embrace It, Or Get Left Behind!

Neil Koenig, TV Producer, Journalist and ideaXme board advisor interviews Keith Clarke CBE, a senior construction industry figure shaping the modern sustainably built world and a passionate environmental campaigner.

Keith is currently Chair of Constructionarium, Member of Advisory Board, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University and Director Women in Property Network. Moreover, until recently he was Chairman of the Forum for the Future, a leading international sustainability non-profit.

A 40 Year Career in the International Construction Industry

Over the past 40 years Clarke has worked in all sectors of the UK and international construction industry, including as Executive Vice President of Skanska AB, Chief Executive of Trafalgar House Construction and Chief Executive of Kvaerner Construction. He has held executive positions at Olympia & York and New York City Public Development Corporation, as well as working as an adviser to the Qatari Government. As Chief Executive of the UK’s largest engineering consultants WS Atkins for the eight years to 2011, Keith led the business to considerable growth, supporting its investment in the Middle East and its involvement in the 2012 Olympic & Paralympic Games. He is also credited with shaping Atkins to respond to opportunities created by the low carbon economy.

Constructionarium:

Constructionarium is a unique learning experience for students studying built environment courses, allowing them to apply the theoretical knowledge in a safe practical setting whist replicating iconic structures from around the world.

The Environmental Change Institute, Oxford:

The Environmental Change Institute, Oxford was established in 1991 ‘to organize and promote interdisciplinary research on the nature, causes and impact of environmental change and to contribute to the development of management strategies for coping with future environmental change’.

Women in Property Network:

Women in Property Network creates opportunities, expands knowledge and inspires change for women working in the property and construction industry. They believe that success and its rewards should be founded on merit and expertise, rather than gender. They support young females aspiring to a career in the built environment sector, as well as supporting those in ‘mid-career’ and at board level.

The Interview:

Neil Koenig Senior, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another ideaXme episode. Today, we’re going to be talking about the enormous challenge posed by climate change and in particular the impact of our built environment.

Construction A Huge Source of Greenhouse Gases

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:00:25] It’s not just heating and cooling our homes, offices and factories that causes environmental problems. It’s the very act of building them, too, with construction activity being a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions. I’m going to be discussing all this with someone who’s been arguing passionately for decades that climate change is an issue that the construction industry needs to take very seriously indeed.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:00:51] Keith Clarke has spent many years running various construction and engineering enterprises, including eight years as chief executive of Atkins, one of the UK’s largest design and engineering consultancies. Keith, tell us a bit about yourself.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:01:06] Well, thanks Neil. I’ve had an accidental career, unfortunately. I started as an architect and I went to New York where I participated in economic development of the city, which was, believe it or not, during the days of pre-fax, let alone pre-mobile phones. It was when the geographical competition wasn’t China or India, it was in New Jersey. So, it was a completely different world of industrial stabilisation.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:01:34] I’m making a steady transition. It was a fantastic eight years with an economic quango, working for the mayor. It was just an amazing opportunity, I would never allow anybody working for me to do that many things on their own, it was extraordinary. Then I worked for a developer, then ran a construction company, one of the UK’s largest, and then ran the UK’s largest engineering consultancy company, which is fantastic fun. It’s really all to do with cities. I have to confess, I’m a city boy, born in London. I get nervous when I haven’t got six million people around me, and the future is urban. That’s sort of my background.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:02:15] Now I’m sort of semi-retired, I’ve chaired a couple of charities and I’m now chairing an experiential learning construction area where we teach people how to build stuff and work together and talk to each other. As well as the Active Building Centre, which is a government sponsored research program and a few other things, as you do. I’ve had a fantastically unpredictable career, which I’d always encourage for anybody. There are unusual surprises, which makes it much more fun.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:02:50] How did you get interested in the topic of sustainability and in fact, what do we mean by the phrase sustainability?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:02:59] Well, let’s me answer the second bit. Nobody ever agrees on what the definitions are of sustainability. We all kind of have an image of it. But everybody’s image is like a Venn diagram, it kind of overlaps. Generally, I think it’s a feeling that the world was running out of resources. WWF had the one planet calculation years and years ago, which has been sort of superseded by climate change being more pressing.

Protecting The Future

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:03:29] The general issue of fairness and equitability and protecting the future for those who are not yet born is what it’s about. There are lots of people that have done fantastic work on this. What got me into it was that I was always nervous about this general wishy-washy description of sustainability and my children and their activism moved me onto it. I’ve got three girls, all of whom have forged their own careers in a way that I’d never be brave enough to with values which are fantastic. I don’t think I can take any credit for that. I think that they’ve influenced me.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:04:10] Their influence made me start to relate it to the stuff we were doing in the business and one of the great things about business, is if you give people dignity in what they’re doing and they’re proud of it, you get a successful business. Their ability to do good work and enjoy it and go home very proud at the end of the week makes money for the shareholders. It makes them happier. It makes them more challenged. It’s fantastic and you start to relate that to some of the bigger problems. It became pretty clear for me certainly 15 years ago that climate change was structurally different as an issue from all the other issues we’d been dealing with such as gender inequality, racial inequality, economic inequality, the biodiversity issues or air quality.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:05:09] We had a structurally different issue.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:06:23] So your daughters kind of inspired you to take a hard look at the question of what was happening to the environment.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:06:36] Yes, and their awareness of society and I think what’s really encouraging when I look at some of the students I’ve talked to and the youngsters, and most people are younger than me now, is their ability to assimilate these things and think that it is part of their responsibility rather than somebody else’s. The extinction rebellion movement and the school kids strike on climate change is about that ability to assimilate a complex issue and realise it’s not somebody else’s. It is us now, and that’s a big change.

UN Sustainable Development Goals

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:07:14] Moving from sustainability to climate change, if you look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals. They’re fantastic. Arguably, some of their metrics distort the way you do things, but that’s true of any measurement calculation. At least we have a global agreement on ecosystems and the 17 measures. But they’re all somewhat dependent on reaching 4 degrees or not. If you can keep it below 1.5, you can actually achieve water quality and biodiversity. If you get to 4 degrees, you can’t achieve any.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:07:57] When you say 4 degrees, you’re talking about 4 degree rise in average global temperature.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:09:12] It’s shorthand for where we’re currently going, which is in excess of 4 degrees. The Paris Accord said we would limit average global temperature rises to 2 degrees. Then we should look at if it’s worth getting to 1.5 degrees. A report in 2019, which was led by some fantastic groups of scientists looked at if it was worth it. Is it worth the extra effort of decarbonising that much more and how quickly? It was a real cost benefit social calculation.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:09:46] Rather disappointingly or alarmingly, they came back saying, not only is it essential to limit the global temperature to 1.5 degrees and we’re already at 1.1 or 1.2, but we also need to do it quicker. The UK government declared net zero to be achieved for our economy by 2050, China said 2060. Many private companies are saying 2030.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:10:25] Quite interestingly, the private market is moving quicker than many governments on this and not because of their ethics. I’ve run a major company that’s listed. Depending on the private sector, to be ethical at scale is an interesting challenge. Relying on them to manage risk and be greedy is a lot more predictable and they’re doing it because of risk. They’re doing it because a world at that temperature means your assets are not viable. So, think of BlackRock publishing a fantastic letter saying we are looking at a major reallocation of capital, the like of which we’ve never seen, because of climate change. Also, look at all the oil and gas companies, Total is now Total Energy, trying to stop being an oil and gas company and being an energy company, BP, Shell is undergoing massive transitions. These are globally disruptive trends where people have understood now the landscape of climate change.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:11:27] I’ll come back to this issue of, why doesn’t everyone understand climate change? There are very good reasons why we don’t understand climate change. It is incredibly complex. It’s not just technology, it’s science, it’s politics, it’s human behaviour with risk, and I have to say, we’re all pretty appalling at evaluating risk. When things get too difficult, we ignore them. People say to me, have a safe flight, they don’t say have a safe taxi ride, but the taxi ride is more likely to kill me than the flight by a huge degree, but we don’t mention that.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:12:05] Then you’ve got the more fundamental issue. Unlike air quality, we could fix air quality in London. We did it with the Clean Air Act back in the 50s. You didn’t have to solve the Clean Air Act in every city in the world simultaneously to improve the air quality in London. Climate change means that everybody has to restructure their economy and change the way they use, generate, distribute energy, the way they use and generate food and the way they drive life.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:15:30] There’s no doubt in your mind that climate change is a huge issue, perhaps the biggest one of all. Can we focus perhaps a bit on a particular sector of this and that’s the contribution or the challenge of the built environment?

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:15:48] The buildings that we use at the moment and those that we’re about to build. What are the particular problems in this sector?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:15:57] I divide the built environment into three chunks. Which are the systems of systems meaning the infrastructure, the stuff in the streets, which provides energy, power, transportation, gas, sewage and all of the stuff that comes to your building. Then I talk about the buildings themselves and what they do and how they perform. Lastly, you have the generators that are either recycling the waste that supply the energy or the goods that feed the system of systems that come through. So, I’m setting aside agriculture as a whole different area.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:16:36] We’re using massive amount of materials. Concrete and cement are two of the most common materials on the globe. We are going to build, in the next 15 to 20 years, something like the equivalent of four and a half to six Europe’s somewhere in the world.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:16:57] What do you mean by four and a half to six Europe’s?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:16:59] If you imagine all of the infrastructure and all the buildings that exist between Ireland and Poland and Norway and Spain and I include Britain in Europe in this definition, a non-political definition of Europe. Imagine all the infrastructure systems, all the power plants, schools and sewage systems. Somewhere in the world we’re going to be increasing the urban population by about 3 billion. We’re also going to be increasing the number of people who are middle class. The middle class will get a fridge. A fridge means you have a dependable power supply, and you have a choice of food. A freezer is for an emergency. You have a fridge, you have light, you have predictable energy. You have a roof. You have Internet. You have a choice. You have a reliable food supply where you can make choices to put in your fridge. You’re like you and me.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:17:49] So, around 3 billion people are hopefully going to get a fridge the way we’ve got a fridge in the top billion people in the world who are living a pretty fantastic lifestyle. Look at me, I’ve got an Internet connection, I’ve got a spare room, I’ve got an insulated wall here. I’ve got electric light; I’ve got a gas fired boiler. I’ve got a car outside that’s a plug in. I’ve got choice. If the construction industry and the built environment provides the same environment, then hopefully it will give quality to those people as well as the bottom billion or two who have nothing and live on less than what I spent on coffee this morning. You’ve got to lift them up. You’ve got to lift up the poor. If you don’t deal with the new middle class and they get what I’ve got the way I’ve had it, we’ll go past 4 degrees and we all get nothing.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:18:40] The way we build buildings and the way we manage the infrastructure that supplies them can actually stop us getting to 1.5 degrees. In of itself, it won’t make us get there, but it can stop us. The decision times for these things are all very different and the industry business models are very different. The car industry has had 10 years to work out electric cars, they’ve been given standards, they’ve had huge investments in technology that is accelerating globally like you wouldn’t believe. The largest electric car manufacturers are Chinese. India is going to chase up that scale. GM is saying that their trucks, their pickup trucks, the icon of the American V8 are going to be all electric. So, that industry is moving.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:19:36] My industry is barely scratching the surface. We’re talking about having heat pumps. The heat pumps’ coefficient of efficiency is hopeless at the moment. We need to be restructuring our industry really very quickly and there’s going to be massive winners and losers in that. The industry has hugely different design cycles and time frames. If you want to put nuclear in, that’s probably a 20-year decision. If you look at Hinkley Point nuclear power station, we talked about that for 20 years, it’s still a few years away from opening. The French four plants that EDF have been building are now, I think, 10 years late.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:20:17] So, you put your best on the table for nuclear, whatever you want to bet, one plant, two plants, three plants, and you’re going to wait 10 to 15 years to see that bet mature. You want to put a bet on high speed two, which is a new high-speed line in the UK, it’s a bet you make now and then it comes out 10 years later. For a solar farm, you can make a bet now, it comes out a year later. A wind farm make a bet now offshore and it’ll come out in four or five years’ time.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:20:47] It’s a bit like having a big roulette table, you’ve got to put bets down and keep them there until the ball stops spinning and some of the balls will take a long time to stop spinning. You have to hold your nerve and some of them will be hopelessly redundant with luck by the time they’re there. Canals were made redundant; MP3 players were made redundant. Technology comes and goes, and we can’t get to a perfect answer. It would have been quite nice if the first phone I bought had been as smart as this one. Why is it I get a better phone every six months? There was a point when you didn’t buy a laptop because next week, they’d be one so much better than last week’s.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:21:27] Well, to roll out that technology in the built environment happens much slower. If you turn up with a fantastically great net zero boiler heating entity or fuel cell or something, it might take more than an hour or two to get that installed in fifty million homes globally, 100 million, a billion homes. Those cycles of knowledge structurally are very different. We are seeing in other industries things such as people talking about retiring the A380 large Airbus as it’s now old technology not suited for a low carbon world. It was only built 10 or 15 years ago.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:22:26] Interestingly, product manufacturers are really moving. They’re doing some great stuff. The industry that installs them seems to be incapable of responding. For youngsters coming into engineering, this is a fantastic time. It should have been a fantastic time 10 years ago because we could have done this 10 years ago. Actually, all the talks I’ve given on this subject over the last 15 years obviously have had no effect whatsoever because we have the biggest problem we’ve ever seen. It is now a climate emergency.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:22:57] Going back to the question of the construction industry and how it can be persuaded to change. If you’re looking at the way buildings are constructed, let’s take the material, concrete, cement and so on, are there new materials out there that could have less impact on the environment? Also, how easy is it to persuade the industry to start using these materials on a large scale?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:23:35] The whole material and product stuff is really fascinating. There is some really good research going on now with low carbon concrete. In fact, Keltbray which is a really good piling demolition contractor in the UK, have a proper research arm. They’re using low carbon concrete, it doesn’t get you to net zero, but it sure as hell is progress. They’ve been using it in piles, they’re starting to use it in other places and for temporary works.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:24:05] One of the first things you can do, and some other contractors in the UK and I think abroad are looking at this, is instead of using concrete as a filler, a free, inexpensive, when in doubt filler, you can actually start to change the grade of concrete used. In general, the habit has been, when in doubt, up the standard, go to a higher spec which has greater carbon intensity, but who cared? You use it for all sorts of temporary fill or blinding, which is covering the surface.

International Cement Producers Pledge Net Zero By 2050

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:25:06] Some of the major international cement producers have declared they will get to net zero as a product by 2050, even though they have no technology currently available to do it. That, to me, is an incredibly encouraging sign that people are willing to stake the objective. Rather than waiting for a convenient, viable solution, they’re saying we will find a solution.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:26:42] I think there is a danger though, and the chief medical officer of America came out with this when being interviewed. When asked what was the greatest risk, he saw to society globally, he didn’t say Covid, although at that point, more people had died in America of Covid than in the Vietnam War, the First World War and the Second World War put together. He said the greatest risk was the rejection of science.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:27:10] The rejection of science is a real danger, and we can see that. In the end, climate science is science. It’s well-established. It’s been going on a long, long time, well before the beginning of this century people were looking at climate science. Our ability to model that science accurately now is an unbelievable achievement. Because it’s an inconvenient answer to our lifestyle and the way we want to heat our buildings and the way I want to insulate my windows, the way I want to travel means some people, quite large numbers of people certainly in America, simply deny the science.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:27:57] The built environment and the way we run cities really brings it home. This is not some esoteric power plant that has nothing to do with me. This is about your lifestyle, the way you pay for your energy, how you pay for your modification to the environment and the way you travel. It hits home. There was a great survey. I think it was a UK survey asking people if they would support a carbon tax, it didn’t specify how the tax would work, but something like 54% or 58% supported a carbon tax, which is very encouraging. I would note, and I think Nick Stern pointed this out as well, that it’s a bit like a diet, I’m on a diet, but this biscuit doesn’t count. When it comes to carbon tax, I’m really keen on saving the environment, but I’m not changing my gas stove, that’s different. So, there’s inconsistency in our own behaviour and it’s a behavioural issue.

Can We Change Industry?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:28:58] The built environment is the absolute crux. Can we change our industry? Yeah, I think we can. I think all the major design and engineering firms globally have signed up to race to net zero, which is the UN science-based target. Most of them are now wondering how to do it. They’re fantastic smart people who are great at answering questions and they pose themselves that question. Contractors are beginning to follow and beginning to struggle with biodiversity. There are some groups, both here and in America, which are starting to make real progress in how they think about that design process. The cultural norms differ from country to country.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:29:49] The other thing that’s interesting is that firms are telling me they can’t hire graduates unless they can articulate how they’re dealing with climate change. Graduates don’t want to work for a company that doesn’t understand the magnitude of this change. They want to work for companies that can engage with them on this issue, which is fantastic news. I don’t think our universities are teaching all the courses in the built environment to deal with this. I think the universities are lagging behind. The research around the world is fantastic. The ordinary courses in engineering have got a long way to catch up, both here in the UK and in the other areas I’ve dealt with.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:30:37] Is a revolution the way we run cities? Revolutions are not predictable. There’s not going to be an orderly plan. There’s going to be suboptimal decisions made very, very quickly, I hope. Then in three years’ time we’ll go, oh if only I’d known. That’s called progress. If you wait for the ultimate plan, the key solution, the entirely predictable technology, you don’t get out of bed in the morning.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:31:12] You expressed some optimism there, that the construction industry is moving in the right direction. Is it moving fast enough and how do you create a sense of urgency in the boardroom?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:31:30] Yes, good question. I think it’s a combination of peer pressure, I have to say it doesn’t apply to me, but most people are vain and have unconscious bias. I’m perfect. None of us want to be embarrassed by our peers. Of all the human emotions, peer pressure and not being embarrassed and being at the front as a winner is a pretty powerful motivator. It really is, more so than money quite often. So, you’ve got that, and you’ve got to move now in line with what people view as essential and a lot of people have sustainability experts in their business. I think boards are finally catching up on it. I was very fortunate at Atkins as I had a board that was very supportive of this 15 years ago. I had Sir Peter Williams, who understood all of the science. It was fantastic having someone like that on the board.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:32:43] Boards for a long time have understood, whether private or public boards, that sustainability and social inclusion and diversity were an issue, but it was sort of parked at the edge. Climate change comes into the middle, it changes the way you offer your services. It’s not the “we’ve run our business and we give out T-shirts at the weekend” sustainability type nonsense. This is at the core; this changes your business model. It changes your fee structure. It changes the way you guarantee your product. It changes the way you advise clients to procure. It changes the way you train people. It is disruptive. I think that’s the big change I’ve seen in the last five years and it’s accelerating. It’s gone from being something you have to deal with and report on to being at the core and money is driving it. £900 billion worth of pension funds in the UK signed up to net zero in their portfolio by 2030. Globally, environmental social governance funds have the biggest inflow of any funds, particularly in Europe.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:34:00] We’re seeing massive change to how money, debt and equity are available to people addressing the climate change risk. We’re not just talking about investment in renewable wind farms. We’re talking about people looking at the risk in all businesses, in retail, in building, in development, in housing. Is it protected against climate change risk? Is it credible in terms of its own carbon footprint? That is coming through the door at a rate which I never believed would happen. You can read it in the financial papers every day.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:34:39] Would you say that you’re more optimistic now about the response of the construction industry than, say, five years ago?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:34:49] Oh yeah. I’m much more optimistic than five years ago. There were some good people doing some great work. Now I see companies struggling with this at mass. For years, all the big companies have had teams that could do net zero projects or close to it. What they couldn’t do is out of, say, 18000 people, have 18000 people do the projects.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:35:19] When I did the low carbon review for the deputy prime minister Peter Mandelson years ago, probably 15 years ago, a major developer in the UK said that they can build a net zero carbon house. They couldn’t build net zero carbon housing but said that they could build a house. Doing it at scale is beyond the industry’s capability and what’s changing now is rather than having odd teams who were fantastic high performers, is doing it at scale. So, the day of the exemplar project being not that great but the people doing the project being good is simply not good enough. Now it’s got to be every project struggling to up the game. That’s what companies are now dealing with which five years ago most weren’t.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:36:10] That’s true for the design firms, the architectural firms and the project management firms. The SMEs are trying to get on and cope with this because it’s pretty disruptive. The product manufacturers are probably moving quickest of all. It’s a very complex industry we have that’s very disconnected. It’s full of extraordinary characters who are really entrepreneurial people who solve problems. Construction is full of people that are fantastic at solving problems. Are we good at avoiding them is a different issue and are we good at transferring knowledge and R&D? Well, I think that will cause some shakeout in the industry. Now, I’m much more optimistic than five years ago. The problem is that it should have been like that ten years ago. I mean, we don’t have much time left.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:37:01] If we don’t have much time left, is the industry going to be able to move fast enough on its own? Is it going to be able to make the changes necessary without pressure from outside the industry? Because despite the optimistic examples you’ve given, this is a huge industry with a lot of entrenched practices. If you compare it to a large supertanker, those things take a long time to change course, don’t they? Think of all these plants churning out concrete and cement, you can’t change those overnight to produce low carbon materials, can you?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:37:52] No you can’t and they’re going to take probably a decade to get there. But the amount of money going into that sort of R&D is increasing. There are stories about SPACS which are special purpose acquisition companies which are in the press all the time now. They are companies which float without a purpose and then buy someone to have a purpose. Two of them bought, effectively, medium haul electric plane companies as an investment and a bet in the future for electric planes which don’t have fossil fuels. Presumably you have a non-fossil fuel energy supply in the grid, but it will mean no air pollution which is massive technology.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:38:46] Those bets are going to start to happen in the production of steel and concrete and start to happen in the production of hydrogen and the production of large-scale energy storage. Not just your lithium battery for your house, which we’ve got here, we’re talking about seasonal variations. We’re going to see, I think, different technologies. Already we’ve seen a massive change in the way you have your light bulb. We’ve gone through about six generations of technology to get to the LCD that I’ve now got, which is dimmable. I can choose the quality of light and the colour of light, which 10 years ago I couldn’t, and they last for 10 years. Those sort of technology revolutions are going to come through and start to come into how we build steel. We might use a bit more timber, I’m cynical about timber being the solution to everything. I think there will be some very interesting surprises about what materials we use and how we use them.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:39:49] One of the big questions for the developed world is rather than building new all the time, can we reuse the assets we’ve got and rather than recycle, can we start to look at the re-use of stuff? Some contractors are already doing that. They’re keeping the inventories of material that they can reuse, not recycle. Some good stuff is being done in Canada on bridges on that. For developed economies, that ability to milk what you’ve got to a higher level is very efficient. It’s inconvenient because there’s more design risk, more certification risk, and it’s a harder thing to procure. Something new has a few really interesting characteristics. You get a ribbon to cut, politicians like ribbons to cut. You have the ribbon disease, have a new school when actually, you could renovate the old one, save a shitload of carbon and still play with technology. But there’s ego, so the vanity thing is something we’ve got to address. I think you can do that; you can just make it embarrassing to spend that much of the Earth’s assets on something. It should be embarrassing.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:41:03] Like, it’s embarrassing if I lit a cigarette and I started smoking, I would be kind of embarrassed. It might or might not be against the law, but you’d be embarrassed by bad behaviour. Or if I suddenly started drinking whiskey and soda in the morning, you might think twice about that.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:41:24] So, one of the keys to this is changing behaviour, in the boardroom and everywhere?

The Davies Report

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:41:34] Yeah, I think it is changing in the boardroom. One of the changes which is slowly happening, not quickly enough, I think, is the diversity that you need in the boardroom, diversity of gender, of ethnic background and of experience. We did it in Atkins long before The Davies Report, which was a report in the UK about getting more diverse boards. Every time we’ve got a more diverse board, meaning less people that are like me, we’ve had better board discussions. It’s just so obvious. All the data says when you have more people like yourself, you all agree with yourself and you all confirm your own bias, and we all have biases. So, the more diverse the board in all sorts of aspects, the more fun it is and the more productive it is and the better performance you get.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:42:32] The real change is the middle management when he or she is running 50 people or a big project with pressure from the chief exec saying meet your budget. The client is difficult, and they’ve got staff to look after and some of the staff don’t get on with each other or have issues. The really tough job is the middle management in most companies. They’re the ones who are going to deliver. It’s a bulk and issue policy. In the end, it’s projects. It’s what you design on Monday. It’s what concrete you do or do not pour on Tuesday. It’s what you put in the procurement spec. It’s how somebody organises the logistics. Can I get rid of half the trucks and consolidate? Can I engage with suppliers in language they don’t quite understand and convince the client this is a better solution? It’s really tough on capital projects.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:43:39] That’s going to be, I think, where a lot of the education and engagement needs to be. We’re seeing signs of that. We’re seeing signs of companies, certainly in the UK, starting to do that engagement.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:45:06] I’m kind of optimistic and governments are moving. An implicit in your question is who leads, and I don’t think it’s about leading. I think it’s one of those things that’s a bit like line dancing. Everybody has to be moving, and in some cases, somebody will be dancing a bit quicker than others and others will be chasing and then be pulled to the front by those ahead of them. So, I think there’s a sort of dynamic. It’s probably less like a line dance where we all move in perfect unison and like the Scottish reel where you throw people around and occasionally someone crashes into a chair, but it’s vigorous and you dance with people you don’t normally dance with. That’s the characteristic of climate change.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:45:13] Now, let’s take the construction industry and compare it to a more directly consumer facing industry like the car industry. The car industry is one that is very competitive. It’s trying to anticipate its customers’ needs. It’s trying to offer new features, things they haven’t thought they needed in a race to get ahead.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:46:32] Is that something that the construction industry can do as well?  If there’s got to be a really strong push to change hearts and minds and sentiment about the issue of climate change, construction can’t afford just to be reactive, can it, it needs to be proactive, doesn’t it?

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:46:55] Yeah, I agree.

You can’t wait for the market, just like you pointed out in cars. You have to anticipate what they’re going to want and then I persuade you it’s a really good idea. Nobody went around saying, I need electric windows. Why can’t I have electric windows? People produced electric windows and said, isn’t that nice?  Oh, by the way, here’s remote looking, by the way, here’s GPS, here’s an automatic gearbox that really works. Oh, by the way, it’s automatic headlights, you don’t have to bother turning them on. No one was going around saying, my life will get better if I had automatic headlights. So, anticipating those needs for the city and for buildings and for infrastructure is a tad more complex, but it is happening.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:49:51] The good aspect of CO2e, is that you turn it into a singular driver. I think for agriculture and big infrastructure projects, biodiversity net gain is another complexity. So not to belittle that, you’ve got to deal with the biodiversity issue. But for most buildings or in an urban context, CO2e, carbon dioxide equivalent and greenhouse gas equivalence is a really good singular driver of a new design parameter. It manifests itself in all sorts of ways. Can you reuse the structure? Can you add two floors to the existing foundations? Can you use the foundations in the ground? All of them are over design and not bother building new ones, just build on them. It happened in London on a major skyscraper. Increasingly, that sort of inconvenient question is fantastic. It doesn’t quite get you to net zero, but it sure as hell stops a whole lot of carbon going in now.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:50:49] The other characteristic, which we sort of didn’t mention, is that climate change is different because it’s time sensitive. So, every tonne we put in now, is a bigger issue than not putting up a tonne. You don’t need zero today, but every gain you can make today, makes it easier to get to net zero in the future and stops what’s called the overshoot, where we’ll actually find a way of geo-engineering stuff out of the climate by air capture or whatever. There are technologies that aren’t proven yet and are certainly not cost efficient. As Lord Stern said, every time you delay, you double the cost of solving the problem. That’s probably more than double the cost if we don’t reduce carbon now aggressively and meaningfully while we look for more lower carbon solutions. So, that means not using concrete now and using lower spec concrete instead, while we work out a really sustainable concrete. It’s an iterative process which is either exciting or frightening or both.

Industry Must Decarbonise At Speed

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:51:58] For an engineer, he or she she’s sitting there today with the problem. This is pretty tough. It’s pretty tough. We can respond. We’ve got the skills. The digitisation of our industry is going to happen, whether people like it or not, it is going to be disruptive, it is going to have some suboptimal answers in the meantime. It is going to make some mistakes, hopefully with the quality assurance that we have in our industry, nothing falls down. Generally, it doesn’t. The issues we’ve had with quality, certainly in the UK have been about standards and we have a disgraceful issue going on with fire protection in the UK and in one particular sector, which is housing. All of those things will have to be addressed for all sorts of reasons. However, decarbonising at speed means you really are going to disrupt the industry. So, embrace it or get left behind.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:53:06] The governments are declaring the issue, society increasingly is saying we understand the risks. Look at Attenborough’s programs. I mean, it’s in the paper every single day. People are beginning to understand this is not a nice to have. It is fundamental, not to your grandchildren, it’s fundamental to your children. If you’re young, it’s fundamental to you. If you want a pension plan that’s worth it? You better decarbonise. Otherwise, don’t bother. If you really think we’re going to be successful working towards a 4-degree world, it’s not tenable option.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:53:48] I’m optimistic about the future because of technology and the fact that people care about future. People do care. There is an awareness of climate change and why it’s not just sustainability, why it’s just not doing things and why it’s about a celebration. It’s a maturing discussion. There’s so much going on, it’s just fantastic. A bit late, but fantastic.

Neil Koenig, TV Producer and Journalist: [00:54:25] Keith Clarke, thank you very much.

Keith Clarke, Chair of Constructionarium[00:54:26] Thanks for the chat. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. Thanks Neil.

Credits: Neil Koenig, Senior TV Producer, Journalist and ideaXme board advisor.

Neil Koenig:

Neil is a series producer, director, and journalist, working in TV, Radio and online, on business, current affairs and factual content.

He has devised, produced and directed series for many BBC TV and Radio networks, and written many articles for BBC News Online.

He has extensive experience of working with high profile hosts, presenters and contributors, including leading politicians and Fortune 500 / FTSE100 CEOs.

He has filmed and recorded at locations across the globe, including experience of working in challenging environments such as the Nevada desert and the Arctic.

A particular focus in recent years has been China, where Neil has made many short form films about the country’s entrepreneurs and billionaires.

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