Use better contracts to hit your net zero targets, legal expert urges

The quality of an infrastructure contract can have a major impact on the effectiveness of carbon management throughout the project, a senior lawyer has warned.

Anne-Marie Friel, a partner and infrastructure law specialist at Pinsent Masons, was speaking at the first meeting of the ICE’s Decarbonisation Community Forum on 30 May.

Bad contracts “tend to do nothing but tick a box on allocating risk”, she stressed. “Good contracts are solutions-focused and designed to drive the right behaviour” when it comes to managing carbon.  

Friel called on the sector to ensure that infrastructure contracts encourage all parties to cut projects’ greenhouse gas emissions from the outset.

“Environmental harm is difficult to rectify. We therefore have to focus obsessively on preventing emissions from happening in the first place,” she stressed.

Outlining the value of the systems approach to infrastructure delivery, Friel pointed out key areas to focus on in contracts:

1. optimising designs
2. reducing waste and re-using or recycling resources
3. improving construction methods
4. integrating measures to improve biodiversity
5. measuring climate resilience

She also highlighted the New Engineering Contract (NEC) X29 clause and the range of documents published by the Chancery Lane Project. These offer useful templates for anyone seeking to contractually motivate action to minimise a project’s lifetime carbon footprint.

Highways to net zero

Hannah Bartram, CEO of the Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport (ADEPT), also spoke at the forum session.

She reported on the progress of ADEPT Live Labs 2, a three-year programme funded by the Department for Transport. Under the £30m scheme, local authorities are working with commercial and academic partners on projects to decarbonise the road network in seven locations around the UK.

One of these projects is testing lower-carbon alternatives to conventional street lighting in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It’s been rationalising the county’s use of illuminated road signs too – for instance, by installing solar-powered ones that light up only when a vehicle approaches.

Bartram also pointed to the project’s use of signage and lines on the road that are more reflective when illuminated by headlights.

“The ambition is for conventional electrically powered street lighting to become the last resort,” she said.