The Atkins diet

EU Infrastructure Editor Huw Thomas meets Atkins Global CEO Keith Clarke, and hears that the construction industry needs to embrace low carbon now if it is to remain fit for the future.

“In a year's time there won't be a green page for the business section. It'll be embedded in all the aspects as a matter of course”
-Keith Clarke

"Climate change is a reality and the consequences are devastating – rising sea levels, decreasing fresh water resources, extreme droughts, storms and flooding. The human suffering and financial costs of the impacts of climate change are enormous, affecting both rich and poor alike... Even if greenhouse gas emissions were stabilised today the climate would continue to change as it adapts to the increased emissions over the past thirty years. The world's population must prepare to minimise the inevitable impact of climate change." It's a powerful statement, but what makes it particularly striking is that it doesn't originate from an organisation like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Instead it is an excerpt from the programme of the 2009 FIDIC conference, an international gathering of some of the biggest names in construction, engineering and consultancy.

"It's a stunning progress," says Atkins Global Chief Executive Keith Clarke when I catch up with him at the event. "It really cheers you up to see it. As opposed to the idea that somebody else has to do it all, FIDIC's come out and said, 'It's us. We're part of the future. Get on the stage.'"

As one of the keynote speakers at the 2009 event, Clarke is a popular presence on the conference floor and securing a bit of time with him requires a degree of perseverance. Just a cursory glance at some of projects in Atkins' portfolio quickly demonstrates why Clarke is in such demand. From metro systems in Dubai and Copenhagen, to airport terminals in China and traffic management in London's Oxford Circus, the firm has its fingers in a huge number of pies.

Despite the pressure he is undoubtedly under, Clarke is excellent company. Plainly spoken and refreshingly untroubled by desire to toe the corporate line, what really shines through is his commitment, both personal and professional, to the concept of sustainability. "It's probably the biggest challenge we've ever had," he says. "But what's interesting is that if you go back 24 months, you wouldn't see a special page on green technology in the Sunday Times' business section as a matter of course. It's becoming mainstream at a rate that you can see in a year's time there won't be a green page for the business section. It'll be embedded in all the aspects as a matter of course, and you'll get the odd bit that isn't. The fact that the FIDIC conference is about sustainability and is talking about anti-corruption, quality and engineering futures in the context of climate change for the engineering profession couldn't have happened five years ago."

This change in attitude is having a major impact on the way business is done. For Atkins, this entails what is essentially an awareness campaign, both for the firm's people and its clients. "It's really an education process to bring people down that journey of where climate change is, why it's just not ordinary corporate social responsibility, why it's different," says Clarke. "The next bit is basically research, so you give people the tools that they can actually use to try and start to calculate decarbonising projects, and then we've found we need to do a third stream, which is about teamwork. You can't do this with your normal group of skills, so actually it's about knowledge transfer and teamwork. The final element is how do you talk to clients about that, and what we've found is that those four areas, you can't answer any one of them. You drift down all four streams simultaneously and sometimes go backwards a bit, but you need to make a journey down them. You can't give people the answer to any one of those streams. The answer doesn't exist yet, and that's the big challenge."

The move towards sustainability and a carbon-based economy necessitates a huge leap into the unknown. Quite simply, the framework for this new economy has to be built entirely from scratch. "The accounting of carbon doesn't exist in any meaningful fashion," Clarke continues. "On the one side that is really exciting. On the other side, it's pretty inconvenient because your clients are going to have to decarbonise. They're going to be regulated. Carbon is going to be rationed. It's going to be priced and it's going be traded in different ways everywhere. Clients have very legitimate questions. They want to be given a design tool, but actually they've got to help us invent it."

Clarke is realistic enough to understand that the solutions to the challenges posed by sustainability and climate change won't appear overnight. Any systems or innovations that do appear aren't going to be perfect in their earliest incarnations. "Once you've invented it, it's probably not going be very right," he says. "It's going to be a little bit right, and it's going to be better than nothing, but as engineers you're going to hate that imperfection." But a partial solution is better than no solution at all. If progress isn't made the long-term consequences are potentially ruinous.

What's the priority?

As much as the consensus about the necessity for new, sustainable ways of working is building, it comes at a time when other challenges are clamouring for attention. With the global downturn continuing to rage, construction is one of the sectors that has been hardest hit. If organisations are focused on weathering the storm how much energy will they be able to devote to fundamentally altering they way they work? For Clarke though, economic conditions should be no barrier to the industry revolutionising itself. "The thing about innovation, the companies that do it, do it regardless," he says. "Those that don't do it either don't do it because there's a recession or they don't do it because they're too busy. If you want an excuse not to change, there's always an excuse not to change. That's the brutal reality of it. We've previously had sustainable growth in some parts of the world, and elsewhere it's been a good market for ten years. If you haven't innovated during that, you sure as hell aren't going to suddenly start. I think companies are beginning to realize a long-term recession means if you don't improve your business, you won't get through if. If anything, it's a spur towards our less performing companies disappearing."

Though Clarke takes no pleasure in the fact that some of Atkins' peers might fall by the wayside, he believes that a difficult environment can at least eventually lead to a stronger overall sector. "Tough markets tend to show who has the ability to adapt and cope with them," he continues. "If you've got a major design determinant like carbon coming in, those that can cope with that are going to do well. Those that wait for someone to turn the standard; there's nowhere for them to hide."

Clarke expresses a fervent hope that interests reluctant to innovate don't become the dominant voices. After all, no society ever improved its lot by settling for the status quo. Quite simply, change is coming and those who don't get on board risk being left behind. Clarke compares the new carbon economy's impact on the construction and design industry as comparable to the effect the internet is having on print media. "I like a newspaper, but sure as hell you're not going to stop it being web based on my phone," he says. "You can't stop it and I think decarbonising the world is reaching the point where enough of the major players in the world are saying that it is an imperative. We're going to make lots of mistakes on the way, but that's something we'll have to deal with." 

This forward-looking attitude from Clarke doesn't mean that Atkins has been entirely untouched by the effects of the downturn. On the contrary, the last year or so have seen some big changes in the business. "We have had difficult choices," he says. "Last October I was going to the Middle East to tell clients why I didn't have the capacity to do work because we couldn't grow quickly enough to service the market at the quality we demanded of ourselves, so we were resource constrained. In November, we weren't resource constrained any more." This has meant cuts in staff numbers which are still ongoing, but not an overall change in strategy. Investments that need to be made continue to go ahead and the firm's commitment to sustainability remains as strong as ever. "We take the view that this is not 'a hold your breath' recession," continues Clarke. "You can't just think it will go away and defer a few training courses and conferences and hope it will be all right in six months. It won't be. Your business has to perform in this environment, which could the environment for a couple of years. And in those couple of years, improve your product. It's time to manage. It's not time to watch."

Taking the lead

Managing through the upheaval generated by a move to a more sustainable way of working is going to require leadership. Traditional opinion on who is going to provide this leadership has generally come down to an either/or proposition between government and private business. However, Clarke rejects this polarized approach and advocates a more collaborative strategy. "The reality is there's a dynamic between private companies, governments in their broadest sense as policymakers and leaders as elected representatives to society and academia, the people that do research and the people who teach," he says. " There needs to the right relationship between industry, universities, higher education establishments. Government actually is the only way you can spin this enough so that you can get a relationship to an evolving policy, policy implementation, new skills, and keep it going." Clarke describes an optimal system as one where legislators and industry feed off each other. "Instead of government deciding that they're going to do something and the private sector saying that it isn't very good, we engage in a different way in formulating not the policy but the implementation of the policy," he continues. "I think if you can do that it's a stunning opportunity for the UK because we have enormously strong world class universities. We have a world class engineering history."

Clarke singles out the UK as one of the better countries with regards to climate change policy, though concerns remain over the ability to effectively implement it. However, he reserves some of his strongest praise for a region that has not traditionally been associated with green issues. "We started investing in some of our carbon source three years ago in the Middle East before we did it anywhere else," he says. "We sponsored a chair of sustainability at a university in Dubai. We've done it for four years, and we did it there because we thought that they were capable of changing the question quicker than anybody else, and they have a vested interest. At some point, most of those economies aren't going to have oil, Saudi Arabia apart.

"The rest of the emirates could easily run out of resources in their view of their economy, which is quite long term. They have a resource issue. Secondly, if you look at Abu Dhabi and the ruler's statement on the environment, he wants to be a world leader on environmental issues. He staked his ground with Masdar and other developments.

Dubai is not far behind. Oman's waking up to environmental codes and most of the emirates are on the journey of seeing it as an integral part of being a world destination or a world financial centre. If you're going to play in the global marketplace, you've got to be seen to be responsible and they've signed up. They've signed up to Kyoto, and I think if you look at their policies, they don't get credit for what they've done."

Ultimately, Clarke is hopeful that the drive to sustainability will have positive effects outside just the environmental sphere. The industry too stands to benefit from this shakeup. "It's an accelerating curve, so I think it's really interesting," he says. "If we can crack it, some of the age-old chestnuts for the construction industry get changed as well, like interdisciplinary working, like knowledge transfer, like communication down the supply chains or the suppliers in embedded technology. You can't get there without doing all that better than we've ever done it before. We've always had an excuse to dance around before, but the good news now is that it's really difficult and that makes it unavoidable as opposed to being really difficult and avoidable."

Stimulus response

Is infrastructure investment really the answer to the economic crisis?

Keith Clarke: It's something you should only do in extremes. It would be appalling to go back to the 1960s when construction was seen as an economic regulator. That is important. We're doing it because we are in a world crisis in terms of finance. It's inevitable the UK is going to get $3 million in input. That's pretty serious.

You're not going fix it by building a few more roads. You're going fix it by having a banking system that works. That's the first priority. It just has to be because look at the amounts that have gone into that to stabilize it. You must have a banking system that works responsibly. After that, some short term stimulus and I mean really short term stimulus is fine, but you need a view of infrastructure that's more than market cycles.

It just takes that much longer and if you can look at decarbonising, you've got to look beyond that in terms of investment. I think the same would be true in America. A stimulus package is, frankly, at the margins. Part of it is to make people feel good. If they feel good, they get more confident. There is a lot to be said for doing things which numerically don't make a big enough difference but give confidence to other people who then do things. Unfortunately, I don't think the stimulus package has done that in either country.