What does Cop29 mean for the UK’s infrastructure and engineering sectors?

While Cop29 faced difficulty with international commitments on areas like climate finance and adaptation, relying on dramatic late decisions, it will make a positive impact on the UK’s infrastructure sector and engineering profession over the next decade.

Madeleine Rawlins is global practice leader – climate change at Mott MacDonald

Holding to a commitment to act as an international leader on climate change, the UK government opened its presence at Cop29 by announcing that it would adopt a new and more ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC).

An NDC is each country’s forward plan for limiting and mitigating climate change, in line with its commitment to the 2015 Paris Agreement and the collective aim of keeping global temperatures well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Submitted in cycles to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change every five years, the latest set of NDCs are due by February 2025 and will cover the period up to 2035.

For the infrastructure sector, the new NDC means our role in enabling decarbonisation will come sharply into focus, with clarity about the performance that programmes and projects must achieve.

The UK’s new NDC will target an 81% reduction in carbon emissions when compared to 1990 levels, which follows on from the previous commitment of 68% by 2030. Rooted in the independent, expert advice of the Climate Change Committee, the government’s decision is ambitious because it’s an uplift on the previous target for the same period, which had been a 78% reduction.

In delivering its recommendation to the government, the Climate Change Committee outlined that the NDC is deliverable with a high level of sustained and shared ambition, across government, society and the private sector.

While the UK’s headline NDC is a political commitment at this stage, it sets events into motion that will influence how our sector designs, develops and operates infrastructure assets going forward. The new NDC is based on the Climate Change Committee’s work toward the 7^th Carbon Budget, which is set to be published early next year and cover the period up to 2042. It will detail the amount of greenhouse emissions the UK can produce and remain aligned with its commitment to 2050 net zero and provide a more detailed view of how emissions will need to be reduced across different sources, including industry, the public sector, transport and households.

The key benefit of this process is increasing clarity and direction on what we must achieve – and when.

As a result of the more ambitious targets set out by the UK’s NDC, and the next Carbon Budget, we can expect to see this reflected in policy, funding decisions and engagement with the public and private sectors. For example, the Climate Change Committee has highlighted that a new plan to decarbonise the UK’s public sector estates will be needed. Greater electrification of transport, heating and industry is also expected. And this is where infrastructure – both the renewal of existing assets and delivery of new projects – will be key.

For the UK’s engineering and infrastructure sector, an unambiguous commitment to significant emissions reduction means that we can work to design, develop and deliver accordingly. The frameworks to manage this process, like PAS 2080, the international standard for managing carbon in infrastructure, are already in place, so we can consistently quantify carbon, work to achieve reductions throughout the value chain and manage the costs of doing so.

Where expertise in engineering, management and development will come to the fore is in enabling the government and the infrastructure sector to understand the performance and prioritisation of existing and planned projects. Our capabilities will also be critical in identifying the balance of technical solutions required and ensuring that the commitment to lower carbon outcomes is met.

This is an area in which our sector has track record. Just over a decade ago, following on from the Climate Change Act in 2008 and ambitious climate commitments at the time, the government was supported by our sector to deliver the Infrastructure Carbon Review. Its findings and recommendations built an understanding of how infrastructure generates emissions in both the construction and operation of assets. This continues to be used today to lower both operational and embodied carbon, contributing to achieving more than a 50% reduction in emissions so far. So, we can already see how engineering expertise makes a real difference and where we can enable the government, business and society to achieve the right outcomes based on the new NDC.

With a greater ambition on what the UK must achieve, we can now collectively focus on delivering this goal.