It’s the scale of it all that is sometimes daunting. On energy, for instance, we have to transition from around 90% dependency on fossil fuels to around 90% on renewables – allowing a little bit of residual space for cleaner and super-efficient fossil fuels (aviation, amongst other things, where technological substitution is always going to be limited). If we had two hundred years to make all that happen, it would be fine. But we don’t. Between 2025 and 2050 is seen by most scientists as the outer time limit available to us.

Which will require an unprecedented level of innovation in every sector of the economy. And that means getting scale in all those sectors to get the right drivers in place to make the innovation happen. From niche to mainstream. Easy! But scale means different things in different sectors.

I spent a day last week at Ecobuild  - ‘the biggest event in the world for sustainable design, construction and the built environment’. That absolutely wasn’t a claim that could have been made at the first Ecobuild, five years ago, which attracted no more than 1000 visitors. This year, there were more than 50,000 people there. Earls Court was flush with exhibitors, from some of the biggest companies in the UK to distinctly ‘alternative’ start-ups taking a massive gamble on enough people falling for their particular ‘breakthrough innovation’. There were countless meetings and debates going on the whole time, and the kind of buzz that one doesn’t always associate with events of this kind.

For the politicians who’d dropped in, and wandered around looking a bit bemused, it all said one thing: no more niches. This was about scale. New orders. Expanding markets. Innovation (in the construction industry!). And even, dare one say it, new jobs.

I won’t be churlish by pointing out that this supply-chain journey (from niche to huge, scaled opportunity) could have been stimulated by the political system many years ago – as it was in Germany, Scandinavia and so on.  At least we’ve got there now, and it’s exciting.

The UK Green Building Council has been a central part of that journey, and is now providing the kind of leadership (across this complex industry and beyond) that the politicians need in order to stay in touch with the developments on the ground.  The UK Green Building Council launched its new Green Building Manifesto at Ecobuild  – and it’s well worth a look. 

Innovation is famously described as one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent  perspiration – great ideas are rarely enough, the challenge is to execute them.

Sustainable innovation can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Our latest report Paint the Town Green has been more than three years in the making but what a story we have to tell.

The report is about a multi-year innovation collaboration which set the goal of creating sustainable paint systems, and about the new products, services and processes which came out of it. It explains how to conduct innovation driven by environmental and social responsibility and why it makes good business sense.

Its not that I’m especially excited by paint – though I must confess to a soft spot after working on it for so long. Essentially the report shows how to use sustainability as a new lens to reinvent and rethink every aspect of our life. If we can do this with paint, imagine what you can do with cars, mobile phones, homes and holidays.

The three-year project set out to study the entire lifecycle of paint – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal - to find ways to make it more sustainable. It brought together ICI Paints AkzoNobel, a manufacturer and supplier, construction group Carillion, a major user of paint, and Forum for the Future.

Here are a few of the innovations:

• Dulux Ecosense, a new range of eco-paint with half the carbon and water footprint of the standard paint sold two years ago and 40 per cent less waste.
• Improved cans which use less plastic and are easier to clean and recycle.
  A recycling scheme in which vehicles delivering paint to Dulux Decorator Centres bring back used cans.
• Envirowash - a mobile brush and roller cleaning station for building sites: instead of pouring contaminated water down the drains it is captured for reuse with the paint residue filtered out.
• Manufacturing improvements that save millions of litres of water used in cleaning production equipment by using it to make new paint.

We also developed new tools for the project like our Streamlined Lifecycle Assessment (SLCA) method and Environmental Impact Analyser  –  a tool to measure the key impacts of a proposed new formulation and compare them against an existing product. This was the key which allowed ICI Paints AkzoNobel to develop both Ecosense and Ecosure trade paint, which won Green Product of the year in the Green Business Awards 2009.

Paint the Town Green marks a unique point in Forum’s innovation work. Some years ago we resolved to only work on practical innovation projects and not write any reports. We caved in on this project, but that’s only because we’re convinced there’s a great story we want to share with others. We hope it provides the one per cent inspiration you’ve been looking for.

Should an engineer designing a new road worry about the embodied carbon of a traffic cone? Should they be calculating the carbon sink opportunity of putting a shrubbery in the middle of a roundabout?

Perhaps not, but they should be considering the further maintenance and operation associated with the project and yes – the million dollar question - they should definitely be thinking about the 34 million cars registered in the UK which could drive on the new road.

Traditionally, design and build infrastructure projects have concentrated on just that - delivering a new asset ready for use, and then handing this over for operation. Anything beyond that - maintenance or repair, or the ongoing use of the asset - simply didn’t fall under the remit of the designer.

Over time however, contracts have expanded in scope, and contractors are now often expected to take on the first five or ten years of operation and maintenance to ensure they plan for the future. Any serious ambitions to rethink our approach to infrastructure to reduce carbon also need to take this wider, whole-life approach.

To take one example, when specifying a motorway central reservation with low carbon in mind, a road engineer may well opt for a metal barrier rather than the full concrete block. But if they were asked to think about the use of the road over the next 50-100 years and the maintenance of that central reservation, they might come to a different conclusion. The metal barrier – though lower in embodied carbon – is likely to be replaced more often than the concrete one, each time requiring a lane to be shut down, causing congestion and consequently a more significant whole-life carbon output.

Four major clients and experienced delivery partners working in infrastructure teamed up with Forum for the Future to think about a consistent method of approach for more holistic carbon management. Through the Engineers of the 21st Century programme, The Highways Agency, Network Rail (supported by RSSB), Atkins and Balfour Beatty tasked young engineers from each organisation to develop a way of assessing and managing the whole-life carbon of an infrastructure project. They came up with a carbon framework, a set of guidance principles and methods of assessment to start developing a common approach for carbon management.

Infrastructure projects, such as building or renewing roads or rail tracks, can take years in the design and build stages, involving a vast list of stakeholders and partners. To manage projects of this size, you have to break them down into contractual stages, supplier frameworks, scope of works and so on, all of which lead towards working within preset boundaries. But what we really want to know at the start of a project is ‘what will be the full carbon impact of doing this?’ or ‘which of our three major options would be lowest carbon overall?’

If the scope of infrastructure projects is expanded to include maintaining and using assets as well as building them, the first challenge is to understand what then falls within the full boundary of each project. If you are considering the impact of people driving on a new or improved road, do you need to also consider the embodied carbon of the cars? And when the construction phase causes congestion or diversions on existing roads, or those popular bus replacement services when railways are being maintained – should that be included in the project carbon total as well? And what about the embodied carbon of the sandwiches eaten by the construction workers on the site, or the paint on the white lines that need to be touched up 20 years later – do we really have to include that much detail to get a full picture?

The carbon framework offers general rules of thumb that will help with these tricky questions. It suggests that first, you should consider all carbon caused directly by a project. Once you have drawn the big circle around the full impact of the project, you can prioritise what carbon you will actively manage and, perhaps more controversially, what carbon you can dismiss because either you cannot influence it or because it is insignificant.

The framework sets out three main categories: carbon you will report (all carbon within the boundary of the project); carbon you will manage (significant, controllable and reducible carbon within the boundary); and carbon you will influence (significant, reducible carbon that may be in or out of the boundary).

It is in this influence box that we can start putting some big issues. A client or designer may not be able to control the number or type of cars driving on a road, but they can influence how they drive with smart design and traffic management. And the carbon reductions available from these kinds of interventions are significant.

The objective is really to enable smarter management of carbon. As carbon becomes an increasingly important factor in projects, the first reaction is to grab whatever data is available, apply some carbon conversion factors and set a reduction target. However, as our understanding matures we need to take a step back and think about where we can get the biggest and quickest carbon reductions – moving on from the low hanging fruit to the big, juicy fruit.

We need serious conversations about a project’s overall carbon impact at the early decision and design stage, informed by clear carbon estimates, in order to sensibly plan for lower-carbon infrastructure.