Now in the fourth year of delivery against our ambitious sustainability strategy, Now or Never, Willmott Dixon’s Chief Sustainability and Compliance Officer Julia Barrett reflects on progress in 2023.
The year served as a stark reminder of the escalating climate crisis, with temperatures hitting a worrisome 1.5°C above pre-industrial level – making 2023 the warmest year since records began in 1850. The undeniable truth is that human-made climate change is hurtling us towards dangerous levels of warming, posing significant threats, especially to the most vulnerable in society.
At Willmott Dixon, our commitment to achieve net zero aligns to limit warming to 1.5°C. We have made good progress, but there’s no doubt we must double-down over the coming years to reach our zero-carbon ambition. After more than a decade of concerted action, we have implemented many of the options available to us; and as a result, our own operational carbon emissions today are 80% less than they were in 2010.
However, to fully decarbonise our operations, we must move beyond our own business operations and tackle the larger challenge of emissions from our supply chain partners, which dwarf our own footprint by 99 to 1. These ‘scope 3’ emissions include a broader range of impacts covering the entire lifecycle of a project. We continue to support supply chain partners who implement measures to understand and reduce their emissions as we strive to halve scope 3 emissions by 2030, and to achieve net zero carbon in our supply chain by 2040.
Risk and opportunities have been front and centre of our thinking as we have published our first full TCFD disclosure in our Annual Report for FY2023; as we prepare for emerging TNFD, I anticipate that the urgency for change will only increase.
Despite the growing evidence of the stark choice we face, there’s no shying away from the fact that, in 2023, the UK government has backed away from its ambitions of global climate leadership on the flawed basis that we have to choose between economic interests and environmental commitments. New policies to “max out” North Sea oil production, delay the switchover to electric vehicles by five years and the postponement of new rules around heating and insulating homes, weakened the UK’s green ambitions at a critical moment.
Globally, the UK may only be directly responsible for around 1% of emissions, but our commitments carry weight and make us an influential advocate for action on climate change. Prioritising short-term outcomes ignores the potential for domestic energy independence and economic growth through the transition to net zero. Every slowdown on the path to net zero not only means greater cumulative CO2 emissions and therefore a higher level of warming but also will result in a greater total cost to the economy as we will inevitably have to transition to net zero having “kicked the can down the road”.
We must build on the agreement struck at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels and rapidly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by switching to renewables if we are to realise the economic opportunity of the net zero transition.
More than ever, we need government to support responsible businesses in their net zero ambitions by providing policy certainty supported by properly funded regulation and enforcement to enable the changes we need; namely to increase standards of energy efficiency particularly in homes and buildings, whilst accelerating renewables deployment and phasing out fossil fuels.
Time is running out; it’s Now or Never if we are to leave a world fit for future generations.