Paloma Hermoso FCIOB works for a B Corp-certified company. But she wonders how much progress the wider built environment is making on green issues
It’s five years since Ward Williams became the first B Corp chartered surveyors in the world, and 2025 marked 10 years since the B Corp movement began.
This feels like a good moment to pause and ask a simple question: how much progress has construction really made on sustainability in the past decade?
We asked fellow B Corp organisations across the built environment to share their honest views. We weren’t expecting glowing reviews, but the strength of feeling was still striking.
One response described progress as “truly awful” pointing to greenwash, weak alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and a lack of leadership.
Others were more balanced. One said that “the industry understanding of sustainability has grown hugely over the last 10 years. However, I am still giving 6 out of 10 as major improvement is being stymied by tick box exercise legislation and thinking.”
The industry has changed. We’ve seen improvements in operational energy performance, experimentation with low-carbon materials, and a growing focus on retrofit rather than demolition and rebuild. But the scale and pace of change still fall short of what climate science tells us is needed.
And the built environment remains responsible for around 40% of global carbon emissions.
So, if I had to give our sector a score, 5 out of 10 feels about right.
Moving from ambition to action
Making construction more sustainable is not straightforward. Regulations evolve, carbon targets tighten, new materials and technologies appear constantly, and most project teams are already juggling time, cost and risk pressures.
That’s why, alongside our 2025 Impact Report, Ward Williams is launching a new initiative in 2026: the Sustainability Pathfinder Handbook. It is a free practical guide designed to help businesses move from ambition to action, wherever they are on their sustainability journey.
“Knowledge sits in silos. Good ideas exist, but they don’t travel far enough or fast enough across the industry.”
Because one of the biggest challenges we see in the sector is that knowledge sits in silos. Good ideas exist, but they don’t travel far enough or fast enough across the industry.
The Pathfinder aims to change that by sharing practical approaches, lessons learned and tools that can help organisations navigate sustainability with greater confidence.
Overcoming barriers
In our experience, the biggest barrier to this isn’t technology, it’s culture.
Short-term decision making, lowest-cost procurement models and fragmented project teams can make it difficult for better ideas to take hold.
The good news is that change is happening. Across the UK we are seeing local authorities, universities, housing associations, contractors and consultants quietly pushing forward with new approaches, new ways of doing things. Thousands of small decisions gradually shifting the direction of travel.
Real progress will come when sustainability becomes the default way we design, build and manage the built environment, rather than the “extra” that gets considered only when budgets allow.
Because if the industry is currently sitting at 5 out of 10, the question is how we move the dial to 6, 7 or even 8 over the next decade.
Paloma Hermoso FCIOB is head of sustainability at Ward Williams.
The post ‘I’m scoring construction 5 out of 10 on sustainability’ appeared first on Construction Management.
