Challenge 5 - HOW TO INTEGRATE COST AND ENVIRONMENTAL EFFICIENCY IN INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT

 

DESCRIPTION OF THE CHALLENGE

Many Finnish cities have launched their own political sustainability programs with ambitious targets to reach carbon neutrality within a couple of decades. In order to achieve this also infrastructure investments should be analyzed and chosen according to their carbon footprint and other sustainability values.

There are various apps that enable either building projects cost or carbon accounting. However, these apps do not communicate with each other or with the building information model (BIM).  At the project level, the accounting is made separately. Cost-accounting itself is today a smooth practice in infrastructure projects. There is also the first software launched for house building projects which combine cost and carbon accounting. In addition to carbon footprint calculations, there are other sustainability aspects that should be taken into account within the political decision-making process. There are biodiversity estimations, planetary boundaries model, no net loss calculation (ecological compensation)  model, and various other perspectives.

However, having separate cost, carbon, and sustainability information for individual projects does not help our political decision-makers to get the bigger picture of the problems.

We challenge the participants to choose this challenge and to help produce better cost – carbon – sustainability information for the infrastructure projects and for the political decision-making process. The information can be attached to a BIM model, an infographic, a calculation model, etc.

We provide the participants with cost calculation data (excel form) and a BIM model.  There are open databases for carbon calculations (SYKEs carbon footprint calculators). Biodiversity assessment tools are available from open-source (Ecosystems Knowledge Networks tools). Unfortunately, there are no open databases for other sustainability aspects, but we challenge you to tell us, how these various aspects should be included in the information.

We hope the challenge inspires participants to find out a solution towards integrated decision making.

 

Mentors

Jouni Heinänen

Jouni Heinänen is a landscape architect and an expert in city planning and sustainability. He has a long experience of planning and problem solving within development, infrastructure projects and city administration. He’s looking forward to the hackathon providing new solutions for communities and decision-makers to achieve more holistic tools integrating sustainability, cost-efficiency and carbon neutrality.

 

Valtteri Brotherus

Valtteri Brotherus is a BIM specialist, who has worked as a BIM coordinator in most of Helsinki metropolitan area light rail design projects during the last decade. Having a master’s degree in environmental engineering, sustainable solutions in urban environment is close to his heart, together with digitalization of construction business.

 

Terhi Tikkanen-Lindström 

Terhi Tikkanen-Lindström is an expert of leadership, sustainability and urbanism, and provide advice to leaders, project developers and policy makers. Her work in finding sustainable solutions for the client is based on research, foresight and joint processing. She hopes the hackathon would provide some solutions to cities and organizations to achieve sustainability goals. In the best case the solutions could create better understanding of the relation of costs and carbon-neutrality.
 

Johanna Tuokko

Johanna Tuokko is a landscape architect and CEEQUAL assessor. She is specialist of a sustainable build environment and has worked with resource efficiency and circular economy in infrastructure projects. In addition, she has been developing methods for city planning digitalization and public participation with Virtual Reality. She hopes the hackathon would provide smart sustainable solutions for future urban environment development.