How can biodiversity be fostered into building design to drive economic growth?
Victoria Collett reflected on the expectations for Oxford North:
“When we received our outline consent the city’s standard was 5%, which is our baseline target but it’s a constantly moving feast - we have added our own stretch target.
She added: “For the commercial district, which is the hotel, park and all the lab buildings, we have a 10% target for biodiversity improvement which is in line with the current national target.
I would say that even at 5%, that requires a significant offsite contribution.
If you move it up to 10%, that’s more offsite and it’s really important to make sure that you can get the right offsite credits.
It's important that we keep it local because it matters to people and that the credits are used for the right type of habitat. For example, at nearby Cutteslowe Park, we have funded a £50,000+ three year project for an extensive new area of wildflower meadow in the lower field. We’re looking into signing up for those credits early on, to maximise the benefit ”
There can be an interesting trade-off between amenity and biodiversity, because for wellbeing, you want the outdoor spaces to be usable, you want people to be able to picnic on the grass but that means that it’s not long meadow grass, it’s short amenity grass. So it’s definitely complex.
She said that Oxford North site ecologist explained that strategic offsite credits are more valuable in many cases than just trying to squeeze in small pockets onsite.
Just trying to tick box credits on your site is not necessarily the right thing to do and a strategic level scheme would be more valuable to biodiversity.
Kathryn Andrew agreed and suggested that putting additional money into the habitat types that take longer to create is advisable.
James York was asked to speak about Morgan Sindall Construction’s approach as a group and not just as a contractor, in terms of reacting to and anticipating the changing landscape.
“As a wider business our group has taken quite a mature approach of trying to do everything we can to reduce carbon in our operation, which we’re doing well, everyone’s focused on it.
We also have our own software – CarboniCa - for measuring carbon, which has been effective.
It provides reliable data, challenges business as usual, represents an integrated approach and is geared towards project-specific information.
It empowers customers to make decisions based on meaningful data and reduces carbon across the life of the assets we construct which is crucial."
As a group, we also make investments across the UK to offset carbon without buying credits. Projects like planting 300,000 trees, reinvigorating peat bogs, anywhere we can find a project to do that, we love to get involved.
Kathryn Andrew spoke about biodiversity at Milton Park, the technology and science park in Oxford:
“As part of that development, we have a certain biodiversity target and we're lucky that the space we have is already green. We’ve got space to put in wildflower meadows and we’re hopefully putting in a botanic wall and using rose planters. We have landscape architects on site and gardeners who can nurture the space. In an urban setting, it can be more challenging. Green spaces are so important to occupiers though – it's all about placemaking.”
Patric Vale of AECOM was asked about costing biodiversity.
“Costing is quite straightforward. If you tell us it’s in your brief then we’ll add biodiversity in and if we say we have to do X and Y to achieve this target and use that as a guide.
We’ll make sure we are asking the right questions too. We’ll say right, what area have we got? Is there space to do that? If it’s an urban setting, how do we offset that?
Ultimately it needs to be in the brief early on so we can cost and budget accordingly. Where it falls down, is the playing back and forth between the design or the ecologist.”
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The panel agreed with the overall premise that ‘Design to Cost’ is the surest route to successful project delivery – and the ability to deliver it should be the yardstick by which project teams should be judged.
‘On time and on budget’ might sound like an old school concept, but it’s the keystone on which the built environment sector rests.
Whatever challenges industry faces in terms of carbon reduction and wider market trends, it needs to remain front and centre.