Event: Chris joins Pacific Association of Quantity Surveyors' Decarbonising the Future Congress

The Pacific Association of Quantity Surveyors (PAQS) has focused its 2023 Congress in Kuala Lumpur on decarbonisation of the built environment and the part that quantity surveyors and cost engineers have to play in this critical mission. As the organisers put it:

Decarbonisation involves significant commitment from everyone. It requires a transformational shift in the way we operate; from sourcing, using, consuming, and thinking about energy.

Joining online, Accelar’s Managing Director Chris Fry was invited to contribute to a plenary panel session to share insights on ICMS3 and its role in globally consistent cost and carbon life cycle reporting. Chris joined co-author of ICMS3, Malcolm Horner, Emeritus Professor of Engineering Management at the University of Dundee and Ken Creighton, Head of the Building Cost Information Service (BCIS) International.

Following Malcolm’s presentation about ICMS3, Chris discussed how to work with ICMS3 as the big umbrella to report and enable benchmarking of carbon emissions alongside costs for buildings and infrastructure projects.  He highlighted the importance of:

  1. Collaboration within multi-disciplinary project teams and with different companies up and down the supply chain (i.e. to supply different bits of carbon data that are needed to build up the whole picture).  

  2. Starting to work with carbon and cost data early in the project’s life and updating/repeating as better data become available, thus pinpointing how decisions and design changes are improving the outcomes.

  3. Getting comfortable with carbon – tCO2e may be a different currency to cost, but many of the same principles apply: accounting, budgeting, forecasting versus actuals, contingencies etc.

Do get in touch if you’d like to find out more about our work to decarbonise the built environment including benchmarking and working with organisations to improve the carbon maturity of their supply chains.

For further information about the PAQS 2023 event please see the congress website: paqs2023.com

2023Chris Frycarbon, ICMS3, Quantity Surveying, net zero, built environment, buildings, infrastructure, chris fry, PAQS