RSSB2676 - Identifying potential rail capital carbon case studies and producing carbon templates

The Rail Industry operates in a context that is undergoing rapid change shaped by external pressures including an increase in extreme weather events, growing demands on infrastructure and a shifting policy environment, such as Brexit.

These changes present new risks and opportunities across the industry - especially those areas with a long-term planning cycle such as infrastructure.

Locking in resilient infrastructure will protect value, secure Britain's railways and prepare the organisation for long-term success.

It is imperative the rail industry further embed and adopt an approach to measure, manage and reduce carbon emissions associated with rail infrastructure developments.

First published in 2009, and updated and re-launched in May 2016 the Rail Sustainable Development Principles (accessible here) define what sustainable development means for the railway.

For carbon, this means the industry has a need to focus on increasing our understanding of this and targeting opportunities to reduce the carbon and cost in new projects.

This project will support the industry to help meet this vision through utilisation of existing data to support future projects to baseline, assess and ultimately reduce their carbon emissions (and cost!).

Currently there are 680 users and 82 projects within the Rail Carbon Tool.

At this number of projects there is an opportunity to use the data within the tool to: a) Identify capital carbon case studies.

This could include case studies featuring: overall purpose/goal of the assessment, uses and design changes because of the output (especially those that demonstrate lower carbon/lower cost), boundaries of the assessment, quantification of the project and lifecycle, for example carbon hotspots, use of key performance indicator (i.e. kilograms (kg) of CO2e, m² gross internal floor area or km of rail), verification, PAS2080 b) Identify templates within those project's carbon assessment (or trees as they are known in the Rail Carbon Tool) that would be useful to others and can be validated to become generic template items to build on the number of rail templates within the tool (of which there are currently 562).

2 Project objectives Engage and work with organisations (see examples in Table 2) and projects (see examples in Table 1) that have used the Rail Carbon Tool to make calculations to seek agreement to obtain access to their data and information to: 1.

Develop at least 5 case studies of best practice and/or guidance of projects that have used the Rail Carbon Tool.

These would be able to demonstrate the work that the rail sector is undertaking to reduce capital carbon.

As mentioned above these case studies could feature:  overall purpose/goal of the assessment,  uses and design changes because of the output (especially those that demonstrate lower carbon/lower cost),  boundaries of the assessment and potential guidance for boundaries for other rail projects, 