National Highways’ corporate carbon emissions rose during the last year, according to the company’s latest update on its net zero highways plan.
The government-owned company also reported a fall maintenance and construction emissions of around 9%, which it said was mainly due to reductions across its major projects and maintenance activities, and a fall in road user emissions.
However, the company appears to have again changed both the baseline period and calculation method against which it tracks its progress towards targets of net corporate, construction, road users by 2030, 2040 and 2050 respectively.
It said it had ‘achieved reductions against all three pillars’, but this appears to be based on reductions against a baseline, rather than over the year that its ‘second-year progress report’ was specifically published to cover.
Graphic from National Highways' net zero highway progress report 2022-2023
The new report shows a fall from a 2019-20 baseline of 110,352 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) to 42,663 tCO2e in 2022-23, representing an overall reduction of around 61%.
However, last year's report said corporate emissions had fallen from 82,150 tCO2e in its 2020 baseline to 26,300 tCO2e during 2021-22. This represented a higher fall of 68% against the baseline, suggesting that progress has been reversed over the year.
While the main change appears to be the inclusion of emissions from ‘leased assets’, this source is included in both the new baseline and the 2022-23 emissions figure.
Graphic from National Highways' net zero highway progress report 2021-2022
As Highways has reported, National Highways adopts a different reporting method for its electricity usage under its plan to cut its corporate emissions to net zero by 2030, compared to its annual report.
For reporting against the net zero plan, the company treats so-called renewable electricity purchased from the grid as being zero emission but it does not do this for the purposes of corporate carbon reporting.
As Highways reported last month, for its 2022-23 annual report it changed its corporate reporting method to reflect the current carbon intensity of grid electricity, rather than earlier forecasts.
Last year’s net zero progress report said 100% of electricity used was from renewable sources and as a result attributed zero carbon emissions to electricity purchased. In this year’s report, it said 99.7% of its electricity was from what it called ‘zero carbon sources’ with the remainder calculated to contribute 202 tCO2e.
Despite stating that it buys nearly all its electricity from ‘net zero’ sources, the company continued to use its net zero progress report to highlight its programme to convert lighting on its network to LED.
The company said that 28% of its network lighting is now LED. As Highways has reported, in last year’s report, the company said 16% of its network was lit by LED lanterns, a figure that it later corrected to 26% after it found around 10,000 LED lights on its network that it had not accounted for.
It said construction emissions fell from 579,866 tCO2e in its baseline to 527,832 tCO2e in 2022-23, a decrease of around 9%, adding: ‘The decreases in all our material categories are representative of emission reductions across our major projects and maintenance activities.’
Road User carbon emissions were estimated to be 27.8 million tC02e, which National Highways said is a reduction of 6%.
It added that by undertaking a re-baselining exercise it had ‘demonstrated its dedication to staying at the forefront of sustainability initiatives and ensuring that its net zero plan remains robust and effective in achieving our environmental objectives’.
Director of environmental sustainability Steve Elderkin said: ‘I am encouraged because I see good decisions being made and we’re moving in the right direction. This has built the foundations of the programme that will deliver our targets, moving us forward as outlined in this progress report.
‘We’ll continue to be open and transparent on our journey to net zero and believe this is the best approach to building trust and leadership in the sector, and our progress is something we are hugely proud of.’
