FOOTPRINT podcasts

Enhancing community through biodiversity improvements

Communities are coming together to change the places where they live for the better and to develop their skills, build their confidence and make new friendships. Enabling businesses to put their corporate responsibility strategies into action helps connect them with communities and helping them build social value into their services.

In this session we hear from the groups, organisations, businesses and landowners creating and developing landscapes and green spaces that boost wellbeing, increase resilience and bring a bit of happiness and joy to those that use them, whilst also delivering biodiversity improvement and help to combat climate change.

Pete Swift, Co-Founder - Planit

Sarah Reece-Mills, Director of Partnerships - Groundwork

Alan Carter, CEO - The Land Trust

Bringing Nature into the City: The benefits of living with nature

Eden is an 11-storey office building in Manchester with a host of sustainability goals. This session will focus on the benefits of its living wall. Featuring 350,000 plants and 32 different species the system replaces regular cladding at a reasonable cost. Attracting birds, bees and bugs, it will provide a huge increase in biodiversity. The plants also remove air pollutants, reduce urban temperatures, and ultimately capture carbon. The team behind it will present:

• how and where it can be installed
• what needs to be done to maintain it
• as a soil-based system how it compares to other living wall solutions
• what are the benefits for carbon sequestration and a host of other sustainability metrics

Chairperson

Angeli Ganoo-Fletcher, Landscape Director - PRP

Speakers

Chris Scott, Development Director - Muse Places

Steve McIntyre, Principal Environmental Consultant - Viritopia

Carolin Gohler, President-Elect - Landscape Institute

Investing in Natural Capital: Benefits and challenges

Our economies depend on the resources given to them for ‘free’ by nature and the environment. Construction activities are highly dependent on these resources. Increasingly, the international community is recognising the vital role of nature and biodiversity in tackling the climate challenge in a way that enables communities to thrive. This growing international focus on preserving and restoring natural landscapes is creating new alternative asset classes based on nature itself.

How can we ensure that the complex ecosystems on which life depends are not depleted? How can construction businesses invest in natural capital and what are the some of positive outcomes?

Chairperson

Emily Day, Technical Director - FOOTPRINT+

Speakers

Graham Edgell, Director of Procurement and Sustainability - Morgan Sindall

Mike Allcock, Chairman - FW Thorpe

Andrew Sowerby, Director - Pryor & Rickett Silviculture

Exploring Regenerative Construction: Socio-Economic Impacts and Innovations

Regenerative construction is an approach to planning, design and construction that aims to create sustainable, resilient, and thriving communities. It goes beyond traditional sustainable development, beyond recycling and reuse, by focusing on restoring and replenishing ecosystems, enhancing social well-being, and fostering economic vitality. Success in regenerative construction is reliant on the value chain working together.

This session will focus on the findings of a novel digital project completed by Morgan Sindall Construction and their partners to re-consider how a secondary school that they completed in 2021 could be re-imagined as a regenerative asset. The project specifically identified the socio-economic impacts arising from renewable processes and products. What are the implications for supply chain, communities, government and individuals?

Chairperson

Simon Corbey, Director - ASBP

Speakers

Gary Newman, Chief Executive - Woodknowledge Wales Ltd

Orla Whelan, Customer Solutions & Portfolio Development Director - Saint-Gobain UK & Ireland

Liz Allen, Partner - The Connectives

Timothy Clement, Head of Carbon & Environment - Morgan Sindall

The role of procurement in driving change

Construction projects have an immense capacity to drive change. As our sector’s interdependency with nature becomes more pronounced, how do we harness that capacity through procurement techniques? We hear from public sector construction stakeholders, who are involved in billions of pounds of construction output, how they use the procurement of construction activities to support the development of nature-based solutions.

Chairperson

Ian Heptonstall, Director - Action Sustainability

Speakers

Fergus Harradence, Deputy Director, Construction - Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

Peter Holbrook, Chief Executive - Social Enterprise UK

Green skills: The workforce of the future

According to the Local Government Association, nearly 700,000 direct jobs could be created in the low-carbon and renewable energy economy in England alone by 2030, rising to more than 1.18 million by 2050. The large scale rollout of retrofit and other construction activities necessary to deliver low-carbon real estate is dependant on the development of a skilled workforce. How do we encourage people to train for these roles and what will be needed to make these dreams become reality?

Speakers

Mark Richardson, Partner - Troup Bywater + Anders LLP

Nathan Fall, Woodland Manager - Nicholsons Forestry & Landscapes

Richard Bull, Deputy Dean - Nottingham Trent University

Tabitha Binding, Timber Knowledge, Skills and Training

Duncan Brown, Assistant Director of Regeneration & Economic Recovery - Royal Borough of Kingston Council

Breakfast Briefing with SRE: Cathedral Hill: A Blueprint for Retrofitting Success

Achieving a net zero economy by 2050 is a significant challenge for the UK. This Breakfast Briefing will delve into the potential benefits of adopting a retrofit-first strategy and its role in advancing our journey towards net zero. 

Retrofitting holds the promise of reducing carbon emissions, energy consumption and utility expenses, but what are the actual reductions being achieved?

A successful retrofit can enhance indoor air quality and thermal comfort, but is this happening in reality?

We know that retrofitting incurs significant costs, but what exactly are our expenditure figures and what financial savings will the client and occupier realise?

Join SRE and Savills Investment Management who aim to answer these questions and more by measuring the impacts of retrofitting the award-winning Cathedral Hill Industrial Estate, Guildford.

This session will cover key factors involved in the retrofit, from initial client objectives, the process itself, outcomes and how what has been learned can apply equally to retrofit and new build projects. 

 

Chairperson

Anna Maclean, CEO - SRE

Speakers

Cara Palmer, Sustainability Director - SRE

Lucy Winterburn, Director of Investment - Savills Investment Management

Andrew Pratt, Managing Director - HBS Construct

Housing retrofit: How do we deal with aging housing stock?

The UK has the oldest housing stock in Europe with up to 40% homes built before 1946. Decarbonisation of the sector is progressing much slower than on much of the continent. Across the UK 70% of homes are owner occupied, 18% are in some kind of social rent and 12% in private rent.

What solutions work for our older housing stock?

Retrofit Balsall Heath is a project overcoming these hurdles, where 649 houses have been retrofitted using Local Authority Delivery Phase 3 funding at no cost to the homeowners. Harnessing the economies of scale that contractors can offer the backbone of the programme stems from engagement with building owners and occupiers to build understanding and confidence in the scheme. 

Within the social rented sector, the HACT’s Retrofit Credits project presents an alternative approach to solving the funding issue. HACT tracks carbon-emission reduction and measures the social value impact from retrofitting dwellings, certified under the Verified Carbon Standard and sells these to businesses who have taken steps to decarbonise their businesses and wish to further offset their emissions. Currently the funding is used to help housing associations and local authorities retrofit properties alleviating fuel poverty and improving unhealthy and energy inefficient homes. 

With 17% of emissions coming from residential building in the UK, the sector has fallen behind due to a mix of lack of funding and uncertainty that the public feel about what they should do. Come and hear how these two projects are facilitating housing retrofit and what these tools could mean to reduce carbon emissions from the built environment.

Chairperson

Loreana Padron, Regional Head of Sustainability - ECD Architects

Speakers

Antoine Pellet, Head of Retrofit Credits - HACT

John Christophers, Architect - Retrofit Balsall Heath