Environmental Policy

Designing within limits

The built environment is responsible for around forty per cent of global carbon emissions and is a primary driver of biodiversity loss. We work to a regenerative standard rather than a sustainable one, because minimising harm is no longer a sufficient ambition for a building that will stand for sixty years.

Every project begins with a carbon budget and a climate risk assessment rather than a compliance form. We reduce demand before adding systems, and add systems before adding renewables. Whole life carbon is assessed from concept through to completion, not at the point a planning condition asks for it. Where a brief or a budget takes a project away from what we recommend, we record the decision rather than present the outcome as our standard.

Material and carbon

We specify low carbon, bio based and reclaimed materials wherever structural performance permits: earth, timber, straw, lime, stone and reclaimed steel. Much of our international work is built in rammed earth, which combines low embodied carbon with cultural continuity and local employment, and which we have spent years learning to build well.

The lowest carbon project is the one that adapts a building that already exists. We presume retrofit and ask for evidence before recommending demolition.

We design out fossil fuel heating wherever it is physically possible, and we say so at the start of a project rather than at the end.

Adaptation, ecology and water

We design for the climate a building will operate within over the next sixty years, using future weather files rather than historical data, and testing passive cooling and ventilation against projected warming. In the Maasai Mara and the Ecuadorian Amazon this means working with vernacular systems that have already solved problems the standard details have not.

Ecology is a design driver equal to carbon. We design for measurable biodiversity net gain wherever the site and our scope allow, regardless of statutory threshold, and in water stressed places we treat water as a primary design driver rather than a services consideration.

Our own operations

We hold the practice to the same standards, and that starts with describing our position accurately. Our electricity comes from renewable sources and we own no vehicle. Our most significant impact by a wide margin is air travel, because our projects are in Kenya and Ecuador and cannot be delivered without being on site. We reduce it by combining trips into single longer visits and working virtually wherever presence is not required.

We do not yet measure the carbon footprint of the practice. From January 2027 we will record it annually, and once we hold two years of data we will set a reduction target and report against it, including the years we miss.