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Carbon Experts Summit 2025

Driving Decarbonisation Forward: Insights, Innovation, and Collaboration for Net Zero

28^th November 2025

Arthian’s, Iain Forsyth (Technical Director, Climate & Carbon) and Agnes Richard (Consultant, Climate & Carbon) attended the Carbon Experts Summit in London, hosted by One Click LCA.

This year’s Carbon Experts Summit in London brought together innovators, sustainability practitioners, technical and policy specialists, and representatives from the construction industry to share industry perspectives, provide real-world case studies, and discuss the challenges and opportunities in driving decarbonisation across the construction and manufacturing industries.

Attending this event highlighted the importance of cross sector collaboration required to achieve the UK’s Net Zero ambitions, as well as providing insight into the opportunities presented by the increasing availability of peer-reviewed/trusted sustainability datasets and tools, to help drive meaningful change. As a sustainability professional in a highly dynamic and ever evolving industry, it is refreshing to learn about different perspectives and come away with new insights from these events that I can apply when working with our clients.

Setting the Scene

The afternoon opened with a keynote from Panu Pasanen (CEO & Founder of One Click LCA), who laid out the industry’s evolving landscape, and how powerful cloud-based tools are helping professionals to keep up with this evolution. He spoke about the increasing pressure (market and regulatory based), particularly within the construction industry to reduce embodied carbon within materials, but also the enormous opportunity to build a next-generation sustainability platform that unifies data, tools, and collaboration across the entire value chain.

A key takeaway from this was the not only the extensive capabilities of the OneClick platform, but also the fact that sustainability and reducing emissions has now transitioned from a ‘nice to have’ but to an almost essential part of any organisation’s operations. It was a reminder that while the challenge is complex, the technology and momentum are rapidly catching up.

Embodied Carbon

A core component of the Summit was a series of short presentations and discussions from representatives from the construction and manufacturing industries providing their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities decarbonisation in the sector through real-world applied case studies. These provided valuable insights which I as a consultant can apply when working with our own clients.

Representatives from Firth Steel and SSAB Swedish Steel explored the path to decarbonising steel, from its production to real-world applications. The focus of decarbonisation is moving towards increasing the recyclable content of manufactured steel, as well as evolving smelting technologies to produce materials without using fossil fuels. SSAB provided an example of a hydrogen-fuelled process which is currently under trial. Their message was clear: collaboration across suppliers, manufacturers, and clients is the only scalable route forward. Firth Steel shared examples of where low-carbon steel is already making its way into UK projects.

Increasing the circularity of raw materials was emphasised further when aluminium supplier Hydro, shared their approach and experience to reducing embodied emissions in their products. Taking a system-based approach from recycling innovations through to renewable-powered smelting, has enabled Hydro to develop a lower carbon aluminium product which they can offer to their customers.

Johnson Matthey provided insight into how they have used cycle assessment (LCA) to support continued development of their products towards the development of more sustainable technologies. The breadth of application across their products highlighted just how important LCA has become in innovation, and the role it can play for manufacturing companies.

Data Driven Collaboration

AECOM shared their experiences of moving from ambition to execution both within their own organisation and with their clients. This discussion provided valuable insights into learnings from their approach as well as the systems and processes needed to ensure that decarbonisation strategies aren’t just written – but actually delivered.

Building on this topic Galliford Try shared their learnings from close collaboration with supply chain partners in quantifying and reducing emissions from produced materials; specifically focusing on steel and concrete. A key takeaway from this discussion was a comparison on embodied emissions across a range of projects where this approach had been applied so that lower carbon products to be preferentially procured. This highlighted that in order to meet many UK building embodied carbon benchmarks requires sector-wide data driven collaboration to inform better decision making.

Tools of the Trade:

The Summit was provided with an overview of the latest updates to the One Click LCA platform, including expanded databases to smarter automation hinted at in the keynote speech. These enhancements are designed to make life cycle assessments faster, more accurate, and far easier to embed in design workflows.

A key addition to the capabilities of One Click is the incorporation of SimaPro into the platform. It is interesting and exciting to see how the ecosystem of LCA tools is consolidating and integrating into a combined solution. From the perspective of a consultant this will only help expand the capability of assessment and modelling support we can provide to our clients.

The Summit wrapped up with a panel discussion featuring representatives from Envision, RICS, MPA UK Concrete, Firth Steels, and the UK Green Building Council. The panel unpacked the fast-changing landscape – from consultations on embodied carbon to upcoming compliance frameworks. This included the formal announcement of the UKGBC’s Net Zero Buildings Standard, designed to drive new build and building retrofit to achieving the sector’s net zero ambitions, as well as insight from MPA UK Concrete on sectoral EPDs being developed for the concrete sector.

The collective message from the panel discussion was clear, highlighting that whilst they welcomed increased regulation in this space the market and broader sectoral requirements, would be the ultimate driver the short term. The panel noted that expectations are rising, and organisations that invest early in data , tools, and partnerships will be the ones ready to meet these expectations.

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Services

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Engineering

Planning Consultancy

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Sustainability Consulting

Net Zero and Decarbonisation

Carbon Experts Summit 2025

Arthian’s, Iain Forsyth (Technical Director, Climate & Carbon) and Agnes Richard (Consultant, Climate & Carbon) attended the Carbon Experts Summit in London, hosted by One Click LCA.

Setting the Scene

Embodied Carbon

Data Driven Collaboration

Carbon Experts Summit 2025

Arthian’s, Iain Forsyth (Technical Director, Climate & Carbon) and Agnes Richard (Consultant, Climate & Carbon) attended the Carbon Experts Summit in London, hosted by One Click LCA.

Setting the Scene

Embodied Carbon

Data Driven Collaboration

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Carbon Experts Summit 2025