Environmental

Together we protect

We’re taking action to tackle the environmental challenges facing our planet, ensuring we safeguard its future for generations to come. We are tackling the twin crises of climate and nature together, not only in how we deliver, but also by integrating these considerations into the solutions provided to our clients.

We’re focused on creating a more sustainable world by ensuring our projects and programmes deliver sustainable infrastructure though low carbon engineering, efficient use of resources, circular economy principles and by incorporating resilience to climate change. We promote nature based solutions and measure and set biodiversity net gain targets across all our projects.

Costain’s environmental management system is certified to ISO 14001 which sets the standard for environmental performance, minimising our impact on the environment and ensuring continual improvement. The delivery of large-scale complex infrastructure brings potential environmental risk, but we’re committed to minimising our impacts and contributing to a net positive future (net zero emissions and nature positive).

Climate change

Costain’s decarbonisation and climate resilience strategy is centred on our climate change action plan, which details our journey to net zero emissions across Scope 1, 2 and 3, and is delivered within projects through our PAS2080 (carbon management in infrastructure) verified processes.  

To meet our environmental ambition we work with our value chain to influence and accelerate change. We continue to improve the adoption of the ISO 20400 Sustainable Procurement principles to ensure we deliver value for our customers, and address mutual ESG challenges.  

Resource efficiency

Our production thinking processes encourage consideration of whole life impacts during the design and pre-construction process, ensuring we deliver sustainable solutions that adopt circular economy principles. By taking this approach we minimise environmental impacts, eliminate waste and maximise efficiencies.

Find out more about reducing materials through our production thinking processes, and how we delivered a 21% reduction in CO2 emissions on the A30 project.

Nature and biodiversity

We’re committed to becoming nature positive by following the Science Based Targets for Nature framework and contributing to a nature-based recovery. We started by setting biodiversity net-gain targets, and are actively working on our nature positive strategy which will account for indirect impacts and the promotion and education of nature-based solutions. 

Learn more about a pioneering ecosystem scheme we led for Southern Water.