Honeywell has joined forces with Dutch design and consultancy group Arcadis to help commercial building owners accelerate their efforts to reduce energy and carbon impact.

The collaboration aims to deliver end-to-end offerings that help building owners cut energy use and carbon emissions as they optimise building performance. The initial focus will be on five international projects, with the first launching this month.

This relationship should strengthen the efforts both organisations are making to help clients committed to improving outcomes related to ESG (environmental, social and governance). The relationship is not exclusive, and both companies expect to add additional collaborations to enhance their offerings in this space.

Data from the World Economic Forum suggest that approximately 80% of today’s buildings will still be standing in 2050, which means the challenge of controlling escalating energy use, particularly in older buildings, to meet carbon-reduction targets will increase over the coming decades.

Many building owners and operators lack the expertise and technology to monitor and optimise energy performance, making it harder for them to initiate change in their organisations. Honeywell and Arcadis offer complementary services to address these shortfalls and will work with clients and customers to map a path towards lower carbon emissions, while improving resilience.

For building owners who have already set goals and made pledges to reduce carbon footprint across their portfolio, the collaboration will deploy a software suite that applies milestones to document progress with tailored insights and data-led reports that show these efforts to internal and external stakeholders. Honeywell and Arcadis will also formulate goals for organisations that do not have access to asset- or device-level energy performance data.

Arcadis brings a background in evaluating business impacts across programmes and portfolios. It assesses ESG risks for companies by developing current-state assessments that analyse technical and financial scenarios to measure impacts across energy and climate, materials and waste, and buildings and infrastructure. Arcadis also helps building owners include other ESG goals in the design of their real estate assets, such as climate adaptation, biodiversity and inclusivity.

“The strength of Arcadis is our ability to help clients identify where change can have the most impact in their organisation when it comes to their energy use and carbon footprint,” said Alan Brookes, CEO of Arcadis. “By working with Honeywell, we can take that insight and provide an end-to-end service from planning to execution and ongoing maintenance to allow clients to reduce the energy use within their building portfolios and demonstrate the value of their investment to key stakeholders.”

Honeywell brings experience in developing smart-building technologies that use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) software to enhance control systems with sensor-driven analytics, occupancy tracking and predictive maintenance. The company also offers services that help building owners fund improvements as operating expenses instead of capital investments.

“By combining our ready-now advanced building controls software with Arcadis’ expertise in sustainability assessments and road mapping, we can develop plans for customers that meet both their short-term need to manage energy use and their long-term aspiration to reduce their carbon footprint,” said Billal Hammoud, CEO of Honeywell Building Technologies. “By drawing on our respective strengths, we can deliver more efficient and effective sustainability for buildings.”

Documenting and reporting sustainability efforts will only increase in importance as more regulatory actions are enacted. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), for example, requires all large and listed companies to disclose information on risks and opportunities related to ESG issues and their impact on the environment. Through collaborations such as this, Arcadis and Honeywell are creating an ecosystem of third-party services to help clients and customers worldwide reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Arcadis is a design and consultancy organisation for natural and built assets. It employs 36,000 people, active in more than 70 countries that generate €4bn in gross revenues.