Sustainability Award
Mott MacDonald supports the Environment Agency’s Net Zero Carbon for Infrastructure programme; an exemplar transformational change programme enabling carbon reduction to achieve UK targets.
The Environment Agency (EA) is responsible for delivering one of the UK’s largest, most complex flood and coastal programmes. The EA faces a dual challenge: to protect communities from current and future impacts of climate change while reducing carbon in its infrastructure. Achieving this requires significant cultural and behavioural change.
Mott MacDonald has been working with the EA since 2021 to design and deliver Net Zero Carbon for Infrastructure (NZC4I), a transformational change programme aligned to the UK’s net zero commitments, the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) 13 (Climate Action) and SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), and PAS 2080: carbon management in infrastructure.
The programme has made significant progress in delivering a range of interventions for managing carbon across the capital delivery programme while upskilling and supporting people to ensure that carbon is brought into decision-making.
We co-created the programme, combining the roles of a partner, designer and critical friend, bringing structured approaches to change management, capability development, process improvement and business analysis. The focus on the technical and behavioural activities, delivered at scale, brought a step change to the Environment Agency’s progress towards its carbon goals. The programme is recognised as exemplar within the EA.
The programme has realised a broad range of benefits, including beating the EA’s construction carbon reduction targets in the last corporate scorecard and significantly increasing the confidence and engagement of the project delivery community with new carbon management processes, building a legacy for the EA: a confident workforce, better carbon data, and sustainability embedded into decision-making.
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