Zero Carbon Design 2030
With the built environment responsible for nearly 40% of the world’s carbon emissions and the need to fight against climate change intensifying, it is imperative that we work together as an industry to take responsibility for our emissions and work to eliminate them.
Zero Carbon Design 2030 (ZCD2030) is a global initiative that aims to engage everyone at Cundall – every office, every discipline, every level – to help our clients achieve their zero carbon goals. It is embedded as one of our core pillars and is a non-negotiable part of our strategy. Achieving zero carbon design criteria on 100% of our projects by 2030 is a challenging target, but we see it as our duty to create a more sustainable future for our planet. We have set ourselves interim targets to measure progress and celebrate the successes on the journey.
There is no existing blueprint for how this can be done, and we recognise that not every project can achieve zero carbon criteria today, but we are committed to being industry leaders and collaborating with our clients and industry to make Zero Carbon Design 2030 a reality.
Progress until now
Now, two years after making the commitment, and five from reaching the 2030 deadline we set ourselves, we can look back on our progress so far, the challenges we’ve faced and mistakes we’ve made, and how we plan on using everything we have learned along the way to move forward.
Governance
The commitment to truly integrate ZCD2030 into our business was cemented by identifying the initiative as one of Cundall’s four strategic business pillars. As a result, our global management board and regional boards meet regularly to review, discuss and track how well we are delivering on our commitment across all disciplines and offices. Every discipline, regardless of size or complexity, has a part to play in ZCD2030. While some, like structural engineering, have clear pathways due to relatively easily quantified carbon footprints, others face more challenges or have a smaller impact. Yet all discipline leads are committed to the goal. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is enabling the creation of tools and pathways that support our ZCD2030 ambition. Every discipline now has at least one ZCD2030 expert. These specialists understand the carbon impact of their discipline, actively upskill their colleagues, and equip their teams with the knowledge and skills needed to deliver truly sustainable solutions.
As of January 2025, 68% of our Consultancy projects have met Milestone 1.
Milestone 1 is about starting a meaningful conversation about carbon emissions with our clients, within our project teams and with fellow engineers, architects and consultants on a project. This may be standard practice for some clients or in certain regions, but in many cases these conversations are exploring new territory or moving the dial from a high-level commitment to a more detailed approach on how decarbonisation could look on a specific project. It helped us to embed zero-carbon thinking across all our projects, and in many cases, deliver a better design with a reduced carbon impact.
As of January 2025, 68% of our consultancy projects have met Milestone 1. Around 12% are still to be discussed, and 19% have not achieved the milestone.
Because new projects are continually entering the pipeline, we will always have new projects that start off needing to be discussed with our team and our client. This means that for over 80% of our consultancy projects, our teams are either already providing emissions reduction advice or are planning to. This reflects progress for consultancy projects across all regions, offices and disciplines. Our next focus is to understand and reduce the number of projects where we have not yet been able to provide this guidance.
Milestone 1 was always a warm-up in preparation for Milestones 2 and 3. We’re not only striving for good outcomes on our projects, we’re also undertaking a huge cultural shift across the company, integrating sustainability and carbon expertise across everything we do, at all levels, all disciplines and on all projects. Reaching this point reflects a significant shift in mindset and design practice, and we are immensely proud of what we have achieved so far.
To advance our efforts for Milestones 2 and 3, we are creating benchmarks for Cundall’s design projects across different disciplines and regions. We are reviewing standard industry benchmarks but also testing whether these benchmarks align with how our projects actually look today. This will be done by utilising our internal lifecycle assessment data bases to understand the carbon intensities for different regions and across various building typologies and sectors.
So far, we have analysed close to 150 projects from the UK, Australia and the EU to generate our own benchmarks. In early 2026 we plan to expand this review to include both industry data and our own project data for the Middle East and Asia. Using these benchmarks, we will define what our targets should look like by 2027 and 2030 targets should be, aligning with a 1.5-degree emissions pathway. This process also allows us to break down our benchmarks and targets by lifecycle elements providing emissions reduction targets for every discipline involved in design projects.
The Cundall Carbon Calculator Tool (CCC), developed by our sustainability team, helps our design teams to measure and compare the carbon footprint of designs across projects and regions. By using product-specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) from manufacturers, the tool can detail the environmental impact of materials based on a product life cycle assessment.
Bringing both targets and project data together, we are establishing a mechanism to capture emissions data from our design projects and then able to track progress against our 2027 and 2030 targets from 2026 onwards.
“From our beginning, Cundall has existed to create the best opportunities for our people and to deliver sustainable solutions for our planet. Zero Carbon Design 2030 unites these commitments - inspiring our people to think differently, challenge convention, and motivate our collaborators, clients, and industry to do the same.”
Duncan Cox, Partner
Progress so far
68%
Of our clients were provided with emissions reduction advice, over two thirds of our consultancy projects
12
Zero Carbon Surgeries
17
Zero Carbon Workshops with discipline leaders with a total of 83 leaders attending
1
Dashboard to track our Milestone 1 progress
150
Project lifecycles data analysed
84
Internal benchmarks for 27 project types in five regions
61
Projects used our CCC tool which has 1,568 EPDs to support the calculations
37
Internal Zero Carbon Talks hosted
Zero Carbon projects around the globe
Nature and circularity
Ten years on from the Paris Agreement, and despite the challenges along the way, global leaders, businesses and societies are beginning to take meaningful steps towards the climate transition and climate risk adaptation. The speed of this process is still far too slow to avoid the most devastating impacts from climate change, but the world has come a long way since 2015.
But on this journey, is has become clear that climate change is part of a larger crisis that undermines our food and water security and puts humanity and our planetary stability at risk. Greenhouse gas emissions are both a contribution and a result of a dangerous decline in nature, caused by humans.
According to the UN Environment Programme:
- One million of the world’s estimated 8 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. (IPBES)
- 75% of the Earth’s land surface has been significantly altered by human actions, including 85 percent of wetland areas. (IPBES)
- Close to 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted. (UNCTAD)
This matters for us as nature provides ecosystem services that are fundamental to our survival and the functioning of our societies and economies.
For decades, the concept of impacts on nature from urban development has largely been focused on risks to endangered species on specific sites, such as loss of forests and woodlands, or visible impacts such as degradation of waterways and marine pollution issues like plastics harming ocean creatures.
Governments are also shifting into action, building on the momentum of the UN Biodiversity COP15, which resulted in the landmark Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework agreement. This global initiative commits governments to take steps to protect biodiversity, which includes mitigating the harm caused by extractive industries, development, pollution, and land clearing.
Mandatory reporting frameworks, such as the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), are now looking to integrate this into their requirements. At the same time, organisations including the World Green Building Council and local Green Building Councils are publishing discussion papers and roadmaps on the topic, for example, the Green Building Council of Australia’s Nature Positive Roadmap (March 2026). In the UK, our own Kevin McGee contributed to the EIC Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) guide.
The rights of Indigenous Peoples and the importance of First Nations stewardship of nature and ecological knowledge is also recognised in the Frameworks, and the Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures’ (TNFD) requirements reflect this too with the inclusion of both the voice and rights of Indigenous Peoples as an impact area that should be addressed.
What this means for us and our work
Nature based solutions
For the property and construction sector, and organisations like Cundall, the real challenge lies in understanding the full picture of nature-related risks and impacts. However, this also presents a significant opportunity. For example, the supply chain impacts of a construction project using concrete include nature impacts; from sand extraction, aggregates, concrete batching plants, concrete trucks, and more, making it incredibly challenging to picture the environmental footprint and calculate relevant data.
On the opportunity side of the balance sheet, when a masterplan incorporates green infrastructure such as vegetated swales, ponds, reed beds, wildflowers, and trees as part of a stormwater management and urban heat mitigation strategy, the result can be nature positive.
Because nature impacts and biodiversity are a new and complex topic, the property and construction sector and investors are keen to understand what it means for them and what the solutions are. As engineers, our biggest strength is to provide and develop nature-based solutions for our projects that enable nature to be protected or enhanced, support biodiversity and also reduce resource consumption and improve climate resilience.
Nature based solutions in practice
Salalah Smart City
Cundall has been appointed as a part of an international consortium, by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning to create smart and futuristic model cities. The project focus on development of the smart city with advanced utility systems, smart city technologies and flood risk management strategies.
Greater Muscat Structural Plan
The aim of the project is to provide a more focused spatial development strategy for the 1360km2 metropolitan region of Greater Muscat in Oman. The project underpins the Oman National Spatial Strategy and its vision, focusing on strengthening and promoting sustainable design in the urban environment.
Circular economy
Actions to protect nature and biodiversity are deeply interconnected with the concept of the circular economy, as both seek to operate within planetary boundaries while sustaining human well-being.
Biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are increasingly driven by linear economic models based on resource extraction, consumption, and waste. The circular economy offers an alternative framework that prioritises resource efficiency, regenerative design, waste prevention, and the continual circulation of materials and nutrients.
By reducing pressure on natural systems through lower demand for virgin resources, circular practices help conserve habitats, minimise pollution, and protect ecosystem functions. This is especially relevant for our material and land-hungry industry. As designers and engineers we apply circular economy principles wherever possible and work alongside our clients to integrate circular solutions into our projects.
Cundall voices on shaping a circular, nature-positive
We should focus on the retention of our existing building stock and embedding circularity of materials in the circularity of building's themselves.
Blanca Russell Escrihuela, Senior Sustainability Engineer
Currently our industry is responsible for a large portion of all the negative impact on nature, which needs to be reverted to go beyond net zero and towards regenerative design.
Cyril Knabe-Nicol, Sustainability Consultant
Regeneration is no longer a choice, it is a necessity within the built environment to create resilient, sustainable and thriving communities. Regeneration breathes new life into ageing infrastructure mitigates environmental impacts and fosters inclusive growth.
Bobby Modler, Principal Sustainability Consultant
Cundall joined the Engineers Reuse Collective, a not-for-profit group of practicing engineers championing, accelerating and delivering reuse in the built environment to support the transition of the UK’s built environment to net zero carbon and we are proud to be part of this initiative.
The aim of the initiative is to increase reuse in the built environment with minimal reprocessing, to support the transition to circular economy principles and to urgently reduce the carbon intensity of the built environment.
David Rivers, Structural Partner in London, commented on our involvement:
“Reuse of existing construction materials, and fully maximising circular economy pathways, is essential if we’re to hit the ever-decreasing embodied carbon targets needed in the face of the climate emergency. However, while much of the theory behind material reuse is sound, convincing the industry as to its viability and safety has proven trickier. We are therefore thrilled to be able to work with The Engineers Reuse Collective to share best practice, knowledge and real-life case studies and collectively prove that our sustainable future is rooted in maximising the potential of our past.”
Cundall’s involvement with the ASBP has been consistent since becoming a member in 2024, reflecting our commitment to advancing circularity in the built environment.
We have contributed to specialist working groups developing practical guidance on the reuse of glazed partitions and, separately, on the reuse of doors, including fire‑rated assemblies.
Our fire engineering team is now preparing to join a new ASBP working group focused on suppression systems, helping shape industry understanding of how these components can be safely and effectively reused.
Beyond technical guidance, we have also supported knowledge‑sharing across the sector by helping organise a full‑day event in Manchester dedicated to the reuse of demolition waste, bringing together practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to accelerate progress toward low‑carbon, resource‑efficient construction.
The circular economy outcome metric
Cundall also played an active role in the LETI/CIRCuIT/UCL circular economy metric opinion piece, contributing to the initial hackathon that explored how circularity could be meaningfully measured across projects.
Those early discussions helped shape the direction and content of the final publication.
Since its release, we have continued to engage with the lead author, sharing insights from applying the metric on real projects and highlighting practical challenges encountered in day‑to‑day use. This ongoing dialogue ensures the metric evolves in a way that reflects real‑world conditions and supports more consistent, actionable approaches to circularity across the industry.
Regenerative dynamic procurement platform, Woodknowledge Wales
For Woodknowledge Wales’ ROOT initiative, Cundall has been closely involved in the development of a regenerative dynamic procurement platform designed to make it easier for project teams to source local regenerative materials and services.
Our contribution has focused on ensuring the platform supports genuinely regenerative design outcomes by connecting designers, contractors, and suppliers with regionally appropriate, low‑impact resources.
By helping shape both the technical framework and the practical user experience, we are supporting a procurement model that strengthens local supply chains, reduces embodied carbon, and embeds regenerative thinking directly into early project decision‑making.
Cover image Eden, New Bailey © Simon Buckley / Muse
What this means for us and our work © Photo by Léonard Cotte on Unsplash
New City Salalah © Cundall
Ibri Structure Plan © Nara Cunha
Greater Muscat Structure Plan © Broadway Malyan
Bush Stop © SPARK Architects
The Engineers Reuse Collective, Wellington house © Will Pryce