Barely a few months since COP26, the new year is a poignant reminder that the climate clock is ticking and of the urgent action needed to limit global warming to 1.5˚C. While there is hopeful progress in the growth of green energy and electric vehicles and a shift towards sustainability in business, there is still significant work to do to address decarbonisation in the UK housing sector. Stewart Little, CEO of IRT Surveys, explains how new, data-rich technologies enable property owners, landlords, developers and construction businesses to make smarter retrofit decisions and achieve improved sustainability.

Modern construction projects are more complex than ever, as the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry integrates state-of-the-art materials and technologies into designs to increase usability, maximise resource efficiencies and promote sustainability.

Major construction projects are becoming increasingly more complex, involve multiple task teams and span several years, making projects fraught with challenges. As individual task teams work in isolation from other members of the delivery team, the result is unsynchronised processes and procedures with no defined standards for quality control. As a result, issues are only identified as work commences on site, causing abortive work and wasted materials which all come at a cost to the project and the environment, says Paul Hargreaves, Group BIM Manager at TÜV SÜD.