Custom carbon assessment for transport infrastructure
With EU regulation changes on climate change impact, Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) needed a way to calculate and assess the carbon emissions associated with its road and light rail projects as part of their Environmental Impact Assessments. AECOM developed a custom carbon assessment tool to calculate and analyse the carbon emissions associated with TII’s road and light rail projects and facilitate integration of environmental issues into transport infrastructure planning, construction and operation.
Following a workshop with TII staff and suppliers who would be the eventual end users, AECOM designed a tool, taking into account the specific Irish context that current ‘off the shelf’ tools lacked, such as the effect of carbon loss from peat removal - a more significant issue in the geography of the island of Ireland. The tool is able to assess the main sources of carbon emissions throughout the lifecycle of a project, from high level early design, to construction, use and maintenance, and end of life to identify emissions hotspots and understand where carbon savings can be made.
The tool also allows users to model carbon impacts of different design options for varying levels of design information and enable understanding of relative carbon impacts to influence decision making and reduce carbon emissions of new infrastructure developments. It’s been designed so that new emerging carbon emission factors data can be added.
Some of the potential future developments include expanding ability to collate outputs to benchmarks different schemes, embedment of the tool’s use in all design activities and linking it with other TII tools and systems.