The Entopia Building
The Competence Framework for Sustainability in the Built Environment is designed to be used as a basis for developing discipline-specific competence requirements for sustainability across the building environment industry. It was developed under Workstream 10 of the Construction Industry Council’s (CIC’s) Climate Action Plan, coordinated by The Edge, a multidisciplinary, campaigning built-environment thinktank. The instigator and technical author is Simon Foxell, policy lead at The Edge.
Why do we need a competency framework for sustainability?
It is agreed that the nature and climate emergency is the greatest challenge facing our sector, yet there has only been limited focus on the competence required to embed sustainability into working practices.
Establishing a cross-sector framework for competence in sustainability is essential for achieving a degree of consistency and commonality across different organisations covering the built environment, before they go their separate and distinct ways.
The framework sets out common ground and the language for building individual, discipline-specific competency structures, proposing core criteria and a shared approach without dictating the finer details.
Competence is a general requirement in the Building Safety Act and Building Regulations for any person carrying out building or design work. A competence framework for sustainability became a no-brainer once we realised that it didn’t exist and was clearly urgently required.
Who is it aimed at and how does it relate to engineers?
The framework is aimed at the whole sector – any organisation, whether a professional or trade body, that accredits or validates the competence of its members. Official bodies establishing registers for possible future authorised functions and roles should also use it; this might extend to developing subsidiary frameworks, as happened with building safety competence roles. It might also be used by employers and commissioning clients to ensure a design and construction team that seamlessly covers all appropriate elements of their work.
It is hoped that CIBSE, working with its aligned disciplines, will develop competency frameworks covering sustainability for the roles and disciplines within the membership, based on this sector-wide framework.
What is the relationship with safety competence?
Building safety and sustainability should be seen as deeply complementary. The same degree of skill and attention to detail is required for both. They need to work closely together, and this framework has been deliberately written to follow the same format and much of the phrasing of BS 8670: Parts 1 and 2 on building safety. It should be straightforward to follow all these documents simultaneously and, at some future date, it would be ideal if they could be merged into a joint competence framework covering the different sector needs.
How does it encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration?
The Edge’s core tenet is the importance of collaboration across and between the disciplines in our sector, and the framework is an expression of that. By establishing a common, underpinning set of core categories and use of language, it is intended to foster a collective understanding of sustainability issues and, particularly, of how the different disciplines can work together on projects – interlocking, but without gaps or unnecessary overlaps.
The framework has been developed as a seed document for a British Standard, with wide consultation and guidance from across the sector. It has been written as an addition to the Building Competence series that began with BS 8670: Part 1. As a British Standard, it would become an unavoidable part of the competence landscape in the UK and elsewhere.
How can people get involved?
The framework can be freely downloaded and it is anticipated the sector will adopt it as the base standard for a wide range of discipline-specific competence frameworks.
Feedback on its functionality in use is welcomed at contact@edgedebate.com
