Accelerating Net Zero with Digital - Debate

Achieving net zero carbon is a critical challenge for the built environment over the coming decades. Digital technologies can provide a genuine step change to help us get there, whether applied to urban or building design, construction and operations, material choice, energy systems or transport.

No institution, even when committed to reaching net zero carbon, can do so in isolation. Is the industry ready to collaborate? In this online discussion, audiences question Arup early adopters from diverse disciplines and geographies on their experience in using digital technologies to accelerate net zero.

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Held on the 20th November 2020, panellists took part in two sessions to allow for global participation. Whilst each session follows a broadly similar narrative, a regional perspective is lent by the participation of locally based speakers. 

Accelerating Net Zero with Digital – west session

In the first panel of this session, introduced by Jerome Frost, we discuss topics including computational optimization to prioritize energy retrofit strategies, collaborative efforts to establish curb-side EV charging, and the use of generative design to achieve major carbon reductions over a development’s lifetime.

In the second panel, chaired by Fiona Cousins, we look at how databases such as Madaster can be used to store information about building components, as well as considering the role materials could plan in making net zero wave energy commercially viable.

Accelerating Net Zero with Digital - east session

In this first panel of this session, chaired by Dr. Will Cavendish, we look at how AI driven predictive building systems can reduce carbon emissions in buildings, and also consider how agent-based modelling has been used to understand behaviours in order to drive carbon reduction strategies.

In the second panel, speakers consider how computational structural design has led to dramatic reductions to embodied carbon in tall buildings, and how learning more about the structural health of tall buildings we can also drive significant improvements.