The Benefits of Pursuing BREEAM Infrastructure Certification

Infrastructure projects have a significant role in mitigating environmental impacts, maximising the sustainability benefits of such works, and minimising life-cycle costs. The BREEAM Infrastructure certification scheme (formerly known as CEEQUAL) has now been operating for over 20 years and is the world’s leading sustainability certification for infrastructure, civil engineering, landscaping and public realm projects. It follows a similar assessment process to the BREEAM schemes for buildings. BREEAM Infrastructure encourages sustainability best practice across, and a holistic consideration of, the following diverse topics:

• Communities and stakeholders
• Landscape and historic environment
• Land use and ecology
• Management
• Pollution
• Resilience
• Resources
• Transport

The BREEAM Infrastructure certification process can lead to significant benefits including:

• Capital cost savings: The assessment process identifies potential opportunities to improve sustainability outcomes and operational efficiencies: BREEAM Infrastructure projects have reported savings ranging from £30,000 to £5 million through measures including design changes, reduced resource consumption and waste, and alternative material choices.
• Demonstrating value and ESG credentials: Validating a project’s sustainability performance against an internationally recognised standard is increasingly important in attracting investment and demonstrating the project’s value and ESG credentials to investors and other stakeholders.
• Driving project improvements: Adopting industry best practices deliver improvements to a project’s resource efficiency (energy, water, and materials), waste minimisation, adaptation to climate change, and project and environmental management.
• Managing risks: Consideration of a project’s sustainability impacts and risks ensures assets are designed and constructed to be resilient, adaptable, and future-proofed.
• Benchmarking performance: Measurement of performance allows detailed comparison with other in-house or competitors’ projects.
• Flexibility: The standard does not prescribe specific design measures and encourages innovation, allowing project teams to evaluate and push the boundaries on design and construction solutions.