Carbon footprint and risk assessments

What is it about?

The Paper provides clear guidelines on how engineers should complete risk assessments for projects. This paper suggests values that enable the normal risk assessment table to incorporate climate change hazards resulting from incremental emissions of individual projects. Data for the probabilities and the potential loss of life have been deduced from an engineer-based questionnaire.

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Why is it important?

Engineers have already been advised to minimise carbon emissions and to include hazards from greenhouse gas emissions in risk assessments for each project, but the advice has not generally been adopted. Within construction, consideration of the dangers from greenhouse gas emissions should have major professional, legal and commercial implications. Existing “sustainability” targets tend to have little or no relationship with carbon emissions at the construction stage, and tend to cover other beneficial, but less pressing environmental issues and long timescales that are likely to completely miss addressing the critical hazards. Inclusion of carbon emissions in risk assessments for all projects will quickly help to focus attention on the actual cause of the risks and dangers,

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