ES (D) G Empowering Sustainable Development Goals

Rodrigo Fernandes is director of ES(D)G (Empowering Sustainable Development Goals) at Bentley Systems. Here, we are in conversation with him for TerraGreen.

Could you describe Bentley Systems’ product strategy for supporting carbon footprint reporting and optimization in infrastructure projects?

We believe in a holistic approach to carbon footprint reporting and optimization. Accurately predicting the carbon footprint for all lifecycle stages allows infrastructure engineers and sustainability experts to optimize infrastructure design, minimizing the embodied and operational carbon footprint. This holistic approach can help clarify, in the design stage, the carbon benefits or consequences of investing upfront (such as with insulation) versus investing downstream (such as with heat pumps or solar PV panels). Design is indeed a critical stage in terms of carbon reduction potential—the opportunity to significantly reduce embodied carbon will be influenced by our choices during the initial design stages, where designers can “build clever” by optimizing material usage and designing with low carbon materials. Other Bentley solutions that are part of iTwin will also improve environmental performances at multiple levels and lifecycle stages.

In 2022, Bentley enabled the iTwin Platform to automate generating embodied carbon reports for infrastructure projects by integrating One Click LCA, a platform for lifecycle assessment, and EC3, an application for calculating embodied carbon. In 2023, we started an early access programme using iTwin Experience technology, providing bidirectional integration with EC3 and visualizing carbon assessments in a digital twin without the need to write code. The solution exports a data model to EC3, which performs embodied carbon calculations that iTwin Experience seamlessly reads and visualizes.