Carbon managed live — The Dovetail Building, London

Carbon.Under control.

The next discipline in project delivery — carbon managed week by week on site, not modelled once and forgotten.

See how it works → Talk to Colin
WLCA & LCARIBA Stage 1–4 assessment
Carbon ActualsStage 5 live tracking
4,700+Site materials reconciled
The gap

Every project control gets managed — except one.

Cost, programme, quality, safety: we plan them, monitor them, forecast them, and step in when they drift. Four verbs, every week. Carbon gets the first verb and nothing after it.

Plan
Monitor
Forecast
Intervene
Cost
✓
✓
✓
✓
Programme
✓
✓
✓
✓
Quality
✓
✓
✓
✓
Safety
✓
✓
✓
✓
Carbon
✓
?
?
?

We plan carbon beautifully — model it at Stage 4, put a number in the tender, set a target. Then we stop. That's not a technology problem. It's a management problem.

The two-year blind spot

Predict at the start. Verify at the end. Nothing in between.

Stage 3 / 4

The WLCA model

A consultant builds a whole-life carbon model. It goes to the planners. Everyone signs it off.

Construction

No carbon control

The design team hands over a model. The contractor inherits a target. Nobody owns the number, nobody sees the drift.

Post-completion

The as-built check

An as-built check tells you what you did — 18 months after you could have done anything about it.

↑ 18–24 months where carbon is controlled by no one

Imagine pricing a job at Stage 4 and giving the final account at handover, with no cost reporting in between. You'd be laughed out of the room. That's exactly what the industry does with carbon.

Proof · The Dovetail Building, London

Not a concept. Running live, today.

A working carbon budget, tracked weekly against real site data — built by running carbon the way you already run cost.

2,949t
CO₂e budget from the Stage 4+ model
4,700+
Site materials processed & reconciled
130
Programme lines tracked against budget
Monthly
Client reporting, with variance commentary
Reconciled, not estimated

Every site material delivered to site is checked against the model, carbon assigned from EPDs and government factors.

A live twin model

A Digital Twin of the client's embodied-carbon model runs alongside it, updated weekly through construction.

Drift caught in time

Variance shows up while you can still change the specification — not after the pour.

Read the full Dovetail Building case study
The mandated target saved 2 tonnes.
The lever nobody asked for saved 40%.

The brief mandated all-electric plant. Measurement showed it delivered minimal savings on this site. Switching plant fuel to HVO moved the whole package by around 40% — and nobody had specified it. You cannot know which lever works from a target sheet. You only know it by managing the actual job.

The discipline

Construction Carbon Management

The same four verbs you already apply to cost and programme — pointed at a new number.

01 · PLAN

Turn the target into a budget

Allocate the number by package and by programme line, so it can be spent against and owned — not just aspired to.

02 · MONITOR

Reconcile real deliveries

Match actual site deliveries against the model, weekly, from data you already collect. No new paperwork.

03 · FORECAST

Answer the only question

Where does this land if nothing changes? Answered every month, not discovered at handover.

04 · INTERVENE

Change it while you still can

Change the mix, the fuel, the supplier — while the specification is still open to change.

It isn't a new idea. It's a tried-and-tested idea applied to a new number. Safety wasn't a project control in 1970. Now try running a site without it.

What CBRDesign does

Three services. One continuous number.

From the first design-stage estimate to the last material on site — one model, one baseline, one owner.

RIBA Stage 1–4

Life Cycle Assessment

LCA

Element- and product-level carbon modelling to test options early, compare materials and structural strategies, and steer design decisions before they're locked in.

  • Option testing across materials and systems
  • EPD- and factor-based quantification
  • Clear decisions, not just numbers
RIBA Stage 1–4

Whole Life Carbon Assessment

WLCA

The full building assessment across life-cycle stages — the model that answers the brief, satisfies planning, and sets the budget the rest of the project runs to.

  • RICS 2nd edition compliant · A1–A5, B, C and D
  • GLA WLC and BREEAM Mat 01 submissions
  • Built to become a live budget, not shelved
The differentiator
RIBA Stage 5

Carbon Actuals

Live construction-stage tracking

Carbon run as a project control through construction. Predict, track, intervene — the budget gets an owner, deliveries get reconciled, and drift surfaces while it can still be fixed.

  • Site materials reconciled against the model
  • Automatic alerts when actuals cross the line
  • Audit trail built as you go, for discharge
Why it matters to you

Carbon is now a project risk. For everyone at the table.

Four pressures are converging on construction-stage carbon — and they land on the contractor and the client, not on the consultant who built the model and went home.

11%of global CO₂ comes from construction materials
38%of UK carbon comes from the built environment
2027target year for embodied carbon limits (Part Z)

1Planning conditions

London projects increasingly carry Stage 5 carbon verification conditions. Discharged with an audit trail, or not discharged.

2BREEAM V7 Mat 01

A three-stage LCA with an as-built credit. Measured performance earns credits. Estimates don't.

3Client ESG commitments

Funds and developers with net-zero commitments are pushing construction-stage reporting straight down the chain.

4Tender scoring

Sustainability-weighted evaluation is already here. A credible live-tracking commitment is a differentiator today, the minimum expectation by 2028.

The first contractor to manage carbon properly won't be the one catching up in 2028.
● Licensing to come · in testing now

The Digital Twin — the engine behind the numbers.

Carbon Reconciliation Model & Analysis

The bespoke tool that closes the loop between design and construction. It reconciles what actually arrives on site against the whole-life model, assigns carbon from EPDs and government factors, and flags drift the day it happens — predict, track, alert.

  • Works from paperwork every site already has
  • Automatic alerts when actuals cross the budget line
  • Runs in the browser — no install, no IT approval

Our live carbon tracking platform is currently being tested on live projects. A licensed release is planned for later this year.

Dr Colin Beattie, Founding Director CBRDesign
Dr Colin BeattieFounding Director, CBRDesign Ltd
The person doing the work
“We already plan carbon. We already measure it, eventually. We've just never managed it.

Colin founded CBRDesign to do one thing well: cut the embodied carbon in the design and construction of buildings. The practice works right across the RIBA Plan of Work — modelling carbon at Stages 1 to 4, then staying on the number through construction at Stage 5, where most of it is actually spent.

An architect and sustainability consultant by background, Colin combines a rigorous, standards-compliant WLCA service with a bespoke live construction carbon tracker. The approach came out of live project work, not theory: engaged to run an assessment, the role kept growing until it was, in effect, a carbon management plan written without knowing that's what it was. That method is what the practice runs today.

Colin Beattie signature
Architect& sustainability consultant
RICS WLCA2nd edition specialist
LETIco-author

Also: eTool / Cerclos LCA practitioner · UKNZCBS verification pathway · London-based, UK-wide

Carbon.
Under control.

Whether you're setting a target at Stage 2 or watching one drift at Stage 5 — there's a conversation worth having.

07478 961643
colin.beattie@cbrdesign.co.uk CBRDesign Ltd · London, UK
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