Standards need a mind-shift to address the climate emergency
Technical standards and broader standardisation efforts sit at the heart of most industries. Boring, but essential. They set expectations for quality and performance, enable interoperability between suppliers and systems, and support shortcuts where starting from first principles is unnecessary. Some standards constrain innovation whilst others facilitate it, both are necessary.
Standards are key in responding to the climate emergency. They’re a mechanism to quickly scale new requirements, knowledge and ways of working across entire industries.
This role has been recognised by a number of organisations making pledges around standards and the climate emergency, such as ISO’s London Declaration, the Construction Industry Council’s professional institutions’ climate action plan and the Chancery Lane Project’s climate clauses.
The climate emergency demands radical changes to the way we do just about everything at home and work. This includes standards.
Below is a list of five ways I believe we need to change how standards are developed and consumed.
I use “standards” as a very general term to cover all types of specifications, best practice, exemplars, know-how and guidance. The climate emergency is a result of systemic issues caused by how we live, work, trade and treat the planet. Nothing should be considered out of scope.
There are areas where standardisation deals directly with climate issues, such as carbon accounting, the Science Based Targets Initiative, ISO 14064–1, etc. Moreover, there are many aspects of the climate response that are under-standardised (such as carbon footprinting and offsetting) where greenwash is too easy. New technologies like carbon capture and storage will need to be standardised to scale.
But we also need to consider the vast number of technical standards that place constraints on materials, design and methods that indirectly have a huge impact on carbon in business-as-usual activities (e.g. structural design standards requiring carbon-intensive concrete with large redundancies for unlikely scenarios), or over conservative standards for energy generation which limit innovation and the speed at which new facilities can be deployed.
Finally, there are areas where an absence of standards inadvertently causes climate impact. Where new interoperability standards that improve efficiencies in day-to-day business by reducing work or waste will, in turn, reduce greenhouse gases or natural resource use.
1. Review cycles
Our understanding of climate change and potential solutions is evolving rapidly. Typical review cycles and processes for maintaining standards documents need to be accelerated to keep pace with current expectations and understanding. What was considered good last week, might now be unacceptable.
Standards need to be kept under constant review with release candidates and minor revisions published continuously.
(This is why we’re building Barbal — to accelerate the development and maintenance of knowledge)
2. Participation models
Ideas and observations for improving standards can come from anywhere. Experts convening around a standard can often be subject to groupthink, which can pose a barrier to redefining how a standard achieves the same outcome but whilst enabling a much lower environmental impact. Left-field ideas should be welcomed and allow the community to self-moderate and explore new thinking in public forums.
Standards setting organisations need to open participation in development and review to all users and monitor for groupthink.
3. Publishing and access models
Any barrier to improving how we do things needs to be lowered, this includes how knowledge is accessed. Paywalls disincentivise the use of standards, where their primary aim should be widescale adoption. Alongside the standards themselves, more work is needed on know-how and guidance to support implementation.
Standards that address the climate emergency must be published as open access with freely available supporting resources to accelerate adoption.
4. Authority and trustworthiness
Standards that gain the most traction do so because they are authoritative. Leaders accept the overhead of adopting a standard because they trust that it is best for their business and customers. However, as we are seeing across many industries, the old ways of denoting trustworthiness are being challenged. Social proof, thumbs-ups and reviews are replacing institutional status as the hallmark of quality. There’s a strong risk that snake oil, naive or bad-intentioned publications gain traction and cause damage. Credibility is key in a world where misinformation is rife.
Institutional brand alone is no longer sufficient to denote “best” or “most reliable”. New infrastructures for denoting the credibility and utility of standards is needed.
5. Competition
New needs demand new solutions, this means new standards setting out how the same engineering, technical or safety outcomes can be achieved through more climate-friendly means. When there are competing publications offering the same baseline outcome, adopters with a net-zero remit will need new methods to assess which standards best address the climate emergency.
We need new infrastructures to ascertain how directly a standard helps address climate issues and to compare similar solutions or requirements against a net-zero framework.
Conclusion
The five challenges I set out above do not give easy answers. There are some contradictions in what I call for, but crises call for radical measures. There’s no one organisation who can action the above; regulators, standards bodies and the market all have their part to play. The first steps are recognising that the way we’ve always done things isn’t the way we can afford to do things going forward and if we’re serious about the climate emergency new infrastructures need to be established, and fast.
Thanks to Andy Hale of xtonnes.com for reviewing this article and pointing me to some relevant resources. If you are struggling to get started with carbon accounting, check out xtonnes — they give you a credible estimate of your carbon footprint by asking just 20 questions and highlight the areas to focus on for the biggest impact.
