Reduce the carbon risks involved in creating, buying, managing and improving buildings.

Our team of surveyors, engineers, project managers and sustainability specialist work together to decarbonise and future-proof assets according to their needs and your goals as an owner.

Holistic, commercial, practical: a better approach to decarbonising buildings

Buildings are essential to our lives and livelihoods, but the carbon they emit in construction and day-to-day use contributes to global warming and threatens future resilience.  

But even investors and owners who understand the imperative to act still face real challenges to drive down operational and embodied carbon. This is due to commercial costs, physical restraints of site or fabric, or assumptions about what constitutes a best practice solution.

With a wider holistic and commercial view of buildings, TFT is here to help. We begin by understanding the full picture of your building, from its location to its fabric, its systems to its leasing structure.

With that information, we help clients and wider project teams manage costs and risks, making more impactful decisions to improve every asset on its own merits.

Decarbonising buildings, step by step

For over 50 years our team has worked on improving buildings by managing risks to value, resilience, sustainability and safety. Our approach to decarbonisation is informed by this work, enabling us to help clients create practical strategies, apply them construction or purchase, through use and leasing cycles and into refurbishment or disposal.

Wherever you are on your sustainability journey, our specialists can help you take your next step.

1. Understand your buildings. We’ll help you create a stock of data on fabric, building systems and lease information which will shape your strategy and plans to improve each building in the best way for your needs.  
2. Create decarbonisation plans from purchase through use. Turn the data into a guide for improvement plans which are bespoke to your buildings and your needs. Beyond fabric and engineering specifications or benchmarks, these will account for timelines around lease events, voids, incoming legislation and other critical events needing urgent intervention.
3. Establish sustainable construction principles. We help define your portfolio or organisational strategy for more sustainable buildings, then we put them into use to create your first net zero building, or to refurbish existing buildings to low embodied carbon standards with effective material re-use.
4. Rethink the possibilities of refurbishment & retrofit. The most sustainable building could be the one you already have. We are experienced in working with old, challenging and unattractive assets to give a drastic new lease of life and make them ready or the modern market.  
5. Embed circular economy principles. We work early with our clients to set project ambitions, engage the right supply chains and project partners. It makes all the difference at a time when circular solutions often need to be created rather than just adopted.
6. Improve before you remove. The standard approach to planned preventative maintenance will not achieve the sustainable ambitions of building owners and occupiers today. TFT takes a more detailed approach, not assuming that new is always better than old, and helps you to benefit by retaining and improving existing plant and fabric.
7. Collaborate with owners and occupiers. Creating a high performing, sustainable building is a challenge. Your efforts can quickly be undone if occupants don’t use it in the right way or understand what it can do. Post-occupancy evaluation takes many forms, and can help you work closely to under building user needs, and then to engage important stakeholders to upskill and improve.
8. Share knowledge for continuous improvement. As we deliver landmark projects which push forwards the standard for sustainable development and management of buildings, we make sure that our clients are able to learn from the successes and failures along the way. In this way we've helped portfolio owners to scale their sustainable impacts more quickly and widely than they would have otherwise.

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This approach can help you achieve a cradle-to-cradle building strategy, in which data informs action and action creates new data to propel your buildings towards a more sustainable future.

Decarbonisation is a major challenge for the built environment. Our clear roadmap and experienced team is here to help you navigate it.