Innovate UK Pledges £1 Million Grant for a Carbon Assessment Tool Enhancement

Innovate UK has pledged a grant of £1 million for an industry group led by Morgan Sindall Construction. The grant will help speed up the race for utilizing AI technology to decrease the carbon impact in the construction environment.

Innovate UK’s grant will help innovation

Morgan Sindall launched an AI tool called CarboniCa back in 2021, and it is expected that the award will support the improvement of their proven and tested Whole Life Carbon measurement tool. The company says that CarboniCa has already been used in more than 100 building projects of larger scale and has helped save 30,000 metric tons of carbon.

Morgan Sindall’s director of social value and sustainability, Tim Clement, while mentioning their work, said,

“We started working on the research and development phase of CarboniCa back in 2017, and the Innovate UK funding award recognizes the enormous potential for further development of the tool we have already in service and helping reduce carbon in a transparent, credible way.”

Source: Morgan Sindall Construction.

The Innovate UK funding will be used by partners to speed up the process and improve productivity gains by supporting people in decision-making, developing algorithms for automating the data collection process, and evaluating the Whole Life Carbon Assessments (WLCA).

The WLCAs of the UK construction industry have a much greater weight. The assessment process combines carbon measures for day-to-day activities with those of emissions from materials used in construction and also the emissions produced throughout the life of the building.

The industry is on track to achieve its target of net zero emissions, as nearly 25% of carbon emissions in the UK are from the environment of the building, and around 15% of global carbon emissions are accounted to be coming from materials like cement and steel.

The tool will help reduce the time and cost of carbon assessment

Assessing high-quality carbon footprints is a time-consuming activity, as data feeding usually takes a lot of time and effort. With AI at hand, the new system will reduce the time and accelerate the creation of WLCAs by 85%. The meaningful saving of carbon and time will also help in increasing the adoption of WLCAs in the construction sector and will facilitate the efforts of the country to reduce its carbon footprint.

The Innovate UK’s actual grant is just shy of £1 million, £947,000 to be exact, which is against the research and development costs of £1,418,000 by three partners, including Morgan Sindall Construction, Nottingham Trent University (NTU), and ConstructSys, which is a Warrington-based software company. 

NTU’s Associate Professor in Construction Management, Dr. . Emmanuel Manu, said that the construction process of buildings and then operating them contribute 33% of greenhouse gas emissions and consume 40% of global energy. So it is important to address the life cycle of projects from the very start to reduce their carbon footprint.

According to Tim Clement, the creation and adoption of new solutions such as AI and machine learning brings new challenges, such as using the technology in a highly transparent and human-centered way. He said that the innovation that they are applying is important as it will help set a track to lower carbon emissions in the future.