Supporting our clients with their carbon ambitions

Our investment in understanding and reducing carbon is increasingly enabling our clients to achieve their objectives of lower carbon, cost and faster delivery while achieving high quality.

Our focus is on how we can design, build and maintain low carbon infrastructure and buildings through selection of materials and construction methodologies, operational energy consumption and, where relevant, end-of-life decommissioning, working closely with clients, designers, supply chain and clients.

The opportunity for carbon reduction goes beyond new buildings. The UK Green Building Council estimate that 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built and many of these won’t meet the energy efficiency standards of the buildings we are designing today. The combined skills of our facilities management and construction businesses means that we’re well-placed to retrofit existing building stock to support our clients as they seek to reduce their energy use and carbon footprint. Similarly, our asset optimisation complement this skillset, offering clients a way to increase the lifespan of their schemes, reducing capital and upgrade costs.

Our adoption of carbon calculator tools, will allow the business to integrate carbon calculation with its BIM strategy and suite of digital tools, assisting both project teams and Galliford Try’s Carbon Reduction Working Group to bring real focus and value to our clients and projects in carbon management and reduction.

Our focus on digitalisation, is a key enabler of carbon reduction and we have adopted life cycle assessment software that helps calculate the carbon involved across the full life cycle of a project and reduce the environmental impacts of buildings and infrastructure.

Collaborating with our supply chain through Net Zero Partners

Our Net Zero Partners programme has been developed to remove the main barriers for first generational net zero carbon supply chain in the collective journey to net zero carbon.

Net Zero Partners empowers our supply chain to make decisions around their own carbon strategy and understand what is required to work with Galliford Try on its journey to Net Zero, using a clear set of guidelines and recommendations, and in turn provides Galliford Try with industry insight to inform and adjust that journey.

The initiative is based on three key pillars of carbon literacy, upskilling and continual improvement and quality. These encourage an understanding of what carbon is and how to measure it properly, the skills, knowledge and training required for low carbon instruction, and how to utilise low carbon construction methods and digital tools to maximise quality.

The programme has successfully been launched in our Scottish business and is being rolled out nationwide across England.

Our Journey to Net Zero

We have pledged to achieve Net Zero carbon across our own operations (Scope 1, 2 and operational Scope 3) by 2030 and to achieve Net Zero across all activities by 2045 at the latest. To provide a clear route to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we have also committed to achieving a verifiable science-based target validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). In doing so, we have joined the Business Ambition for 1.5°C to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees and the UN-backed campaign Race to Zero.

We are well advanced on our Journey to Net Zero and have voluntarily reported direct greenhouse gas emissions since 2012 and had them verified to ISO 14064-1, an international standard for the reporting and removal of greenhouse gas emissions that contributes to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for Climate Action. As a result of several carbon reduction initiatives, we have reduced carbon dioxide equivalent emissions across our own operations (Scope 1 and 2) by 65% from 2012 to 2021 and our Carbon Reduction Plan sets out how we plan to achieve this.