We recognise the conflict in our mission to build more homes when the UK construction industry currently contributes a massive 40% of the nation’s total annual carbon emissions.

The stark challenge, is that we need to build many, many more homes in the UK than we have done for the past 30 years, whilst at the same time reduce and in time reversing the negative impact on the planet. Our commitment and leadership in this areas has been recognised with HTA receiving the BD AYA: Net Zero Architect of the Year 2022 award and the Sustainability Architect of the Year 2020.

We ensure our projects significantly contribute to addressing the climate crisis by offering a curated selection of sustainability services and evidence-based design. While sustainable design decisions can be complex in their technical details, our goal is to engage in transparent discussions on how we can minimise impact and enhance the performance of buildings and spaces. We consider the use of passive heating, cooling and lighting and through our training program on Whole Life Carbon Assessment, which encompasses the basics of WLCA, toolkits, standards, and BREEAM determine the appropriate layouts.

We estimate the CO2 impact of the construction of our work by calculating the number of homes we are involved in constructing each year with our contractor clients, but this is not included in our Scope 3 emissions, in accordance with recent UKGBC guidance. Project emissions are captured individually in LCA reporting to the Planning Authority for each project.

As part of our ISO 14001:2015 accreditation and our recent certification as a B Corp, we uphold a robust environmental management system and are dedicated to implementing high standards of carbon reduction initiatives. We use the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) methodology which provides a path to reducing emissions aligning with the Paris Agreement goals aiming to  reach Net Zero well before the 2050 target. We remain committed to being carbon neutral through purchasing of certified carbon credits on our journey to becoming Net Zero.

We have committed to the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge as this gives us a long-term trajectory of emission reductions to help us to predict how our work should perform in the future. We collect data on the projects where we carry out analysis ourselves and plot this as part of our annual Carbon Report. This shows that there is a marked reduction in the predicted emissions arising from the operation of buildings, largely stemming from continuing pressure placed on the industry by the London Plan. The data on embodied carbon is less certain, as it is a relatively recent introduction, and this shows a much smaller reduction, highlighting the challenge that this issue presents to the industry.

We have done a number of studies of embodied CO2 in our volumetric modular buildings and this demonstrates a pattern of reductions compared to current benchmarks that gives us confidence that there are pathways to take to lower emissions in the sector.