By attending, you will

• Understand the core principles of the Iceberg Model.
• Learn how to identify the root causes behind complex challenges.
• Develop a systems thinking approach to problem-solving and driving change.
• Recognise where to focus your efforts to create more effective and lasting positive impact.
• Leave with practical ways to apply the Iceberg Model in your own organisation and sustainability challenges.

CBAM serves multiple objectives, each supporting the broader EU climate strategy:

Preventing carbon leakages: Discouraging industries from��relocating��their manufacturing operations abroad to avoid .

Levelling the competitive playing field:�� CBAM��ensures��that importers of carbon-intensive��products are subject to��a��comparable��carbon cost to the EU’s Emissions Trading System.

Encouraging global emissions reduction:��International producers have incentives to decarbonise their processes, extending EU’s climate influence globally.

Strengthening transparency and accountability:��CBAM mandates the detailed reporting of embedded emissions, making sure that carbon footprints throughout global supply chains are accurately measured, verified and shared.

UK’s��adoption��of CBAM

The UK is due to introduce its own version of CBAM on 1 January 2027, following the EU’s implementation in January 2026. While the systems are similar,��there are a few key differences. The UK CBAM��will be a tax-based mechanism��based on the quarterly UK Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) price in the prior quarter. The UK will also only cover direct emissions when it launches in 2027,��with the inclusion of indirect emissions being delayed until 2029 at the earliest.

Impact on bidding

Imported materials will cost more, impacting bids and project tender prices. To secure work, suppliers must demonstrate emissions transparency in their supply chains, as this is likely to become a procurement requirement written into contracts. While this could create financial and legal risks and costs for companies unprepared for carbon accounting, those with well-established procurement routes with transparent reporting will be less affected and maintain a competitive advantage.

The need to meet CBAM requirements will��likely be��included��in contracts. It represents a risk, and developers and contractors must agree on who is liable for the fluctuation in cost. The appetite for risk along with the market conditions and existing supply chains will inform different approaches and attract differing levels of cost.

Data verification as new standard

If UK emissions trading data cannot be verified or actual emissions data cannot be obtained, importers must show evidence of the efforts they have made to try to��acquire��it��from their suppliers – including outreach, documentation requests and��attempts��to validate information.

This adds administrative work, but prevents companies from simply defaulting to non-specific data, and aligns��with the��EU’s approach��which��limits��default values for reporting, moving toward country-specific defaults and prioritising actual emissions data.

As CBAM rules tighten, real��emissions��data from suppliers will become��essential��and standard. Navigating this complexity can be minimised by setting clear expectations from the start so that neither time��nor cost is wasted by either side.

As a Building Life Ambassador and through our work at BE-ST, our recent work reinforced the scale and complexity of the challenge. The construction skills system is substantial. It includes colleges, universities, private training providers, employers, manufacturers, professional bodies and community organisations. It supports apprentices, students, graduates, existing workers, career changes and specialist practitioners. However, scale should not be confused with coherence.

If we want the sector to respond effectively to the UKGBC roadmaps, we need a skills system that is better aligned with the outcomes we are asking industry to deliver. Climate resilience and whole life carbon literacy can no longer sit at the edge of mainstream provision. They need to be embedded in further and higher education programmes, apprenticeships, professional development and workforce upskilling in ways that are practical, applied and relevant to real work.

There is also more we can do to align approaches across the four nations. The construction workforce does not operate neatly within administrative boundaries. Employers, supply chains and professional standards move across the UK, yet qualification structures, funding models and curriculum arrangements are often disaggregated. Devolution rightly allows different nations to respond to their own economic, social and policy context, but divergence should not become an unnecessary barrier to efficiency, workforce mobility or shared improvement. Greater alignment around competence, evidence and outcomes would help the sector respond more effectively to common challenges.

We should also be honest about the support educators need. Colleges, universities and training providers are being asked to prepare learners for a sector that is changing quickly. That cannot be achieved through curriculum documentation alone. Educators need exposure to emerging practice, live projects, manufacturers, design teams, contractors, clients and researchers. They need time and support to remain current. They also need stronger mechanisms for knowledge exchange with industry, particularly in areas where practice is developing faster than formal standards.

Recalibrate is our leadership programme for C-Suite execs and board members. The first in-person touchpoint of this programme is called ‘Night at the Museum’. Do not put too much emphasis on the title- it is an evening in a heritage space – so neither a night nor a museum makes a debut in this event. If you did think about the movie though, you might be getting warmer, very much like our planet. I did find myself in Ben Stiller’s shoes because very much like the plot of the movie, I did not really know what I had signed up for until the sun went down and took the spotlight and brought to life all the characters playing a role in climate change. Before he takes the stage, we open with an exercise on sharing what is the legacy the cohort wants to leave behind. A thought-provoking talk and a gripping conversation later, we close the evening with a lovely dinner to mark the beginning of a six-month journey they will all be embarking on from that point.

He paints a picture of the quagmire we have managed to trap ourselves into. This year he explained how the manifestation of extractive capitalism that let the market forces run without proper control until now is more durable and shockproof than us and the ‘Goldilocks climate’ that has actualised humanity and the rest of the living planet.��Drawing on the words of from his book , Jonathon compared this manifestation to a wendigo, a mythical cannibalistic creature from indigenous folklore, whose insatiable appetite isn’t for its nourishment but for the sake of it.

What’s worse, he adds, is that it has remoulded humans into happy well-behaved consumers with a psychological pattern to accumulate with barely to no regard for anyone or anything else. There is something emotional about listening to these fast approaching tipping points in a centuries old room that may have stood the test of time until now, but is approaching a bleak future with every passing day of inaction. For me it makes these tipping points seem closer and unavoidable than ever.

After a very heart breaking reality check on the gradual decline of the sustainability agenda against a soaring graph of population and GDP, he brings that aforementioned hope by sharing some very interesting mini-revolutions emerging across the globe, be it Australia’s Solar Sharer offer or Pakistani farmers’ grass roots movement of replacing diesel engines with solar panels. Against dusky skies, it dawned on all of us sitting in that circle, that though there is hope for the future with such brilliant initiatives, the scale of change is nowhere close to being enough leaving the room in an almost eerie silence.

More Food for Thought

After such an engaging conversation, it is only right to��move to a��convivial close. The group went on to get to know each other��and unpack what stood out for them.��The topics spanned everything from��plans for the upcoming summer holidays��to the��possibilities��for the fossil fuel industry��set against��the��unshakable��Trump��administration��alongside UK’s��(yet again)��new administration.��Jonathon left the group with��the words,��‘collectively the question we need to raise is how can we find ways of living that are compatible with the natural world, support justice and fairness for humanity and future generations to come.’��

The table closed��with��the feeling I shared��from the very beginning –��by acknowledging��the privilege of being in this room, around this table and celebrate the opportunity of having these conversations. I am looking forward to hearing more��such��discussions��and what this��group of individuals go on to do in��materialising the legacy they want to leave behind.

By Attending You Will

• Understand why sustainability leadership is becoming a critical capability across the built environment.
• Recognise the mindsets, skills and behaviours that underpin effective sustainability leadership and drive change in complex projects, supply chains and stakeholder groups.
• Build confidence to influence and lead sustainability initiatives, whether or not you have formal leadership responsibility.
• Identify practical actions you can begin applying in your own role.

Heat does not stop at the platform edge or the hospital car park. A railway line that buckles in extreme heat sits alongside homes that overheat for exactly the same reason: both were designed and built for a climate that no longer exists. A wildfire burning outside a town ( as many communities across Europe, and even in the Scottish Highlands have experienced this month) is not a rural problem separate from the built environment; it is a direct threat to the homes, water supplies and infrastructure at the urban edge. A flooded substation and a flooded high street are symptoms of the same underlaying failure to plan for the climate conditions our infrastructure and buildings will actually face over their lifetimes, rather than the ones assumed when they were designed. Britain’s buildings, transport and drainage were never designed for the risks now arriving, but our buildings, transport and drainage are three expressions of the same system.

The need for a joined-up response is not a new observation for UKGBC. It is the argument at the heart of the BuildingLife Ambassador Campaign: that mitigation, resilience and nature recovery are interdependent outcomes of a single system, not three items on a checklist to be worked through independently. A building that meets its carbon target but cannot cope with heat or flood risk has not solved the problem it was set up to solve. The same is true in reverse. Infrastructure resilience delivered without regard to the buildings it serves, or built environment policy delivered without regard to the wider infrastructure it depends on, will always fall short of what the moment demands.

That is why UKGBC’s Net Zero Whole Life Carbon Roadmap and the UK Climate Resilience Roadmap matter so much, and why this campaign matters now. Together, they provide the clearest picture yet of what a genuinely future-ready built environment requires: not just lower emissions, but buildings and places that can withstand the climate impacts already locked in. The Whole Life Carbon Roadmap gives industry and government a common pathway to decarbonise the built environment at pace, while the UK Climate Resilience Roadmap sets out the urgent policy changes needed to embed adaptation into everyday decisions, from planning and design to retrofit and investment. Without both these shifts happening in lockstep, we risk leaving people, places and infrastructure exposed to the impacts of a changing climate.

Every major public investment should be assessed against the climate conditions it will face over its lifetime, and that principle should apply equally to every major building investment and retrofit decision, public and private, and it should be embedded across government, from Treasury spending decisions to planning and infrastructure policy. That means writing resilience requirements into planning policy and building standards with the same seriousness currently given to carbon, rather than treating adaptation as a follow up conversation once mitigation targets are settled.

With a new government now setting its priorities, the opportunity to embed that principle across policy is real. That government is led, for the first time, by a former mayor, and as Prime Minister Andy Burnham brings regional mayors into the newly revived National Economic Council, there is a genuine chance to turn heat resilience from a patchwork of local responses into a national mission.��Burnham has seen the impacts before: as Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2018, Burnham visited crews fighting the Saddleworth Moor wildfires and had to press central government for air support and for assistance with the response costs.��I would love to see the regional Mayors work together on preparing for the effects of extreme heat at a national scale now that one of their own leads the Government, rather than each simply reacting once a heatwave hits. Leaders met at the Council’s first sitting last week; I hope heat resilience was firmly on the agenda, and that it becomes part of the Government’s ten-year plan for growth.