Episode 201 - CIC's Competency for Sustainability in the Built Environment

This week we will be talking about one of the updates coming in 2026 relating to the Construction Industry Council’s framework relating to Competency for Sustainability in the Built Environment. This episode content meets PC3 - Legal Framework & Processes of the Part 3 Criteria.

Resources from today's episode:

Website:

• https://www.cic.org.uk/news/cic-announces-approval-of-new-british-standard-on-sustainability-competence
• https://www.cic.org.uk/uploads/images/Competence-Framework-for-Sustainability-in-the-Built-Environment.pdf?v=1740033726#:~:text=This Standard also supports and,and validating sustainability competence; and
• https://standardsdevelopment.bsigroup.com/projects/9025-12151

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Transcript

Episode 201:

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I am your host Maria Skoutari and this week we will be talking about one of the updates coming in 2026 relating to the Construction Industry Council’s framework relating to Competency for Sustainability in the Built Environment. Todays’ episode meets PC3 of the Part 3 Criteria.

So today’s topic is competence: not just “can you do the job?”, but “are you demonstrably competent to deliver sustainable outcomes across the life of a building?”. The Construction Industry Council (CIC) in collaboration with The Edge, which is a multi-disciplinary campaigning built-environment think tank, have developed a competence framework for sustainability in the built environment which has now been taken forward by the British Standard Institute as the basis of a new British Standard in the competence series that started with BS 8670-1 on building safety.

States worldwide have made legal and policy commitments to address the climate and biodiversity emergencies, including the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Kunming‑Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the built environment is recognised as a major source of carbon emissions and environmental damage. This framework by the Construction Industry Council and Edge has been developed to respond to this context by arguing that everyone involved in the design, construction, management, adaptation and eventual demolition of built assets have both an ethical and legal responsibility to ensure that the built environment becomes sustainable in all its impacts as rapidly as possible.

So how did this framework start:

The Construction Industry Council and The Edge formally launched the framework in February 2025, positioning it as an underpinning framework for discipline‑specific sustainability competences across the built and natural environment. Later in 2025, the British Standard Institute Planning and Approval Team approved the proposal to use this framework as the basis for a new British Standard on sustainability competence, with the Construction Industry Council describing this as a pivotal moment in embedding sustainability into competence expectations across the sector. The British Standard is still under development and hasn’t been formally published yet. 

The competence framework for sustainability in the built environment was developed under Workstream 10 (Competence/Ethics/Advocacy) of the Construction Industry Council’s Climate Action Plan, coordinated by The Edge with support from the University College of Estate Management (UCEM). It was drafted deliberately as a “Seed Document” to be taken into the British Standard Institute process and aligned with BS 8670‑1:2024, which as mentioned sets the core criteria for building safety competence frameworks.

The stated objectives of the Standard are threefold: 

• First, it aims to set core criteria for achieving sustainability, covering issues such as carbon emissions, pollutants, biodiversity, water quality, social outcomes, wellbeing and resilience, for all individuals working on the built environment throughout the lifecycle of projects. 
• Second, it seeks to facilitate consistent and objective development, evaluation and use of sector‑specific competence frameworks by bodies such as professional institutions, licensing and accrediting organisations, regulators, clients and employers. 
• Third, it aims to support a more consistent approach to the development and use of competence frameworks across the built environment, encouraging common language, common expectations and more transparent oversight.

The scope is intentionally broad. The framework is designed to apply to any type and scale of built environment development, and is relevant across design, construction, facilities management and the property sector, both in the UK and, potentially, beyond. Importantly, it is not itself a framework against which individuals are directly assessed. Instead, it provides core criteria against which sector‑specific frameworks for architects, engineers, contractors, facility managers and others can be developed or evaluated.

Now lets look at what the framework consists of: 

The framework has two major elements: behavioural competence and a set of core technical and contextual categories grouped under the headings Potential, People, Process, Projects and Performance. It also adds two cross‑cutting dimensions: knowledge management and communication, and understanding the built environment as a system, including construction products and materials.

Starting with behavioural competence, the framework sets out behavioural criteria that are described as fundamental to achieving and maintaining sustainability outcomes. These are not about detailed technical knowledge, but about how practitioners act relating to ethics, collaboration, and in ways that prioritise environmental and social outcomes. The behaviours include acting ethically and in the public interest, demonstrating effective leadership, teamwork and communication, managing individual and organisational competence, taking personal responsibility and accountability, providing a duty of care to others, and maintaining personal wellbeing and professional standards.

So what does “acting and behaving competently” actually look like, lets expand on the criteria:

So the framework states that without the right behaviours, sustainability objectives will not be achieved, even if technical tools and standards exist. Behavioural competence is therefore treated as a core part of sustainability competence, not a soft add‑on.

In practice, as mentioned the behavioural criteria can be grouped into several themes:

• Acting ethically and in the public interest, this includes responsibility for life, health, the environment and natural systems, taking a broader and longer‑term view, honesty, integrity and transparency and an explicit duty of care to society and future generations.
• Leadership, teamwork and communication. Under this criteria the framework expects visible commitment to a strong sustainability culture, interdisciplinary working, collecting and sharing relevant data, and communicating effectively with both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Managing competence and learning, whereby individuals are expected to act within the limits of their own competence, manage the competence of others where relevant, support a learning culture through recording and analysing outcomes, and actively engage in CPD and horizon scanning.
• Possessing responsibility and accountability, this relates to a duty to anticipate, identify and challenge damaging behaviours, escalate concerns where necessary, and provide feedback on harmful or omitted processes, products, systems or standards that undermine sustainability.
• Possessing duty of care. The framework explicitly references duties of care to building users, workers, supply chain participants and local communities, including the need to anticipate and mitigate harmful environmental conditions.
• Acknowledging service obligations. Meaning practitioners owe a duty of care to those commissioning services, including applying high standards of skill and care, providing appropriate project data, monitoring performance against sustainability measures, and offering effective solutions to sustainability challenges even when not explicitly requested.
• And lastly, sharing knowledge and looking after oneself. This is an expectation that practitioners will share lessons learned, contribute to sector knowledge, report potential harms, and maintain their own health, work‑life balance and mental acuity as part of professional responsibility.

So those were the behavioural competence criteria, now let’s look at the five core technical and contextual categories of competence:

The five core categories are designed to ensure that sustainability competence is understood as system‑wide, not confined to energy modelling or low‑carbon materials. They require practitioners to think across natural systems, human factors, organisational processes, project typologies and measurable performance.

• Starting with potential, the framework asks sector‑specific competence standards to cover understanding of natural and nature‑based systems, resource use, energy and carbon, and social impacts and harms, along with recognised solutions. That includes awareness of concepts such as natural capital, ecosystem services, planetary boundaries, and the impacts of human activities on climate, biodiversity, water and air quality. It also covers knowledge of strategies such as carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, and pollution reduction, and the governance arrangements needed to deploy them appropriately.
• The next core category focuses on people. This category emphasises on education, training and literacy in sustainability, combined with expectations around behaviours and teamworking. Sector‑specific frameworks are expected to set out prior learning requirements, such as formal qualifications, training, mentoring or experience and requirements for maintaining competence over time through activities like CPD, supervised practice and reflection. This aligns with a shift towards validation and periodic revalidation of competence, rather than a one‑off gate at qualification.
• Then the next core category focuses on process. Under Process, the framework addresses finance and risk, professional practice, and tools and technologies. That includes understanding how financial models, procurement routes, contracts and risk allocation can either support or undermine sustainability, how statutory guidance and standards shape sustainable outcomes and how digital tools, performance models and product information can be used to plan, design and manage more sustainable projects.
• The next core category focuses on projects. Under Projects, the categories cover land use and planning, external spaces, infrastructure and accessibility, and buildings. The Standard expects competence frameworks to reference relevant regulatory standards, best practice targets and recognised areas of concern across these domains, and to consider both new build and the much larger stock of existing buildings undergoing retrofit, extension, refurbishment or change of use. For architects, this directs attention to issues such as site selection, density, connectivity, landscape, blue‑green infrastructure, accessibility and inclusive design, as well as building fabric and systems.
• And the fifth and final core category focuses on performance. Under Performance, the focus is on project monitoring, information and feedback, resilience and adaptation, and emergency response. Competence frameworks should therefore consider how practitioners contribute to setting and monitoring performance metrics, learning from in‑use data, planning for climate change and other environmental stresses, and responding to emergencies affecting the built environment. This ties back to the behavioural expectations around post‑project evaluation, feedback loops and sharing lessons learned.

Across all five categories, the framework stresses knowledge management and communication, and the need to understand the built environment as a system, including the role of construction products and materials. This echoes wider moves in the sector towards systems thinking, lifecycle assessment and whole‑life carbon analysis, and towards treating data and information flows as part of the infrastructure of sustainable practice.

For each category, the framework sets out “core competence criteria” which vary dependant on the different stages of a role or function, with staged descriptors ranging from recognising, analysing and applying through to achieving and developing or advancing these criteria in practices. It explicitly links to approaches such as the Construction Leadership Council’s roadmap for skills for net zero, which uses levels such as “aware”, “proficient” and “expert” to describe graduated competence. Crucially, sector‑specific frameworks are expected to map their own competence expectations against these categories, contextualising the criteria to reflect different roles, levels of seniority and types of project. That means various built environment professionals will be expected to demonstrate a different mix and depth of competence.

As such, to assist, the framework has listed out the specific expectations around how sector‑specific competence frameworks should be structured and maintained, which will influence how professional institutions, training providers and employers define and assess sustainability competence.

At an organisational level, sector‑specific frameworks are expected to:

• Identify and provide accessible detail on the sustainability knowledge and skills assessed and attained by individuals qualifying from academic and training courses.
• Make clear the sustainability requirements of membership and qualifying organisations, including the implications of different levels of accreditation.
• Set out requirements for maintaining competence, including time periods, learning levels, types of learning and subject areas, and procedures for monitoring and sanctioning failures to maintain or evidence competence.

Now at an individual level, the framework implies a number of practical expectations, which includes:

• The provision of clearer, more explicit sustainability learning outcomes in formal education and training, and linking these to role‑specific competence expectations.
• Competence in sustainability will need to be maintained and periodically revalidated, rather than assumed from initial qualification alone.
• Practitioners will be expected to understand the limits of their competence, seek appropriate advice, and contribute to a learning culture that records, analyses and improves sustainability outcomes over time.

The framework also explicitly recognises that the majority of a typical built environment project’s life is in occupation and use, and that existing projects far outnumber new construction. It therefore expects sector‑specific frameworks to maintain a balance of competence between new and existing facilities, including alterations, retrofit, refurbishment and demolition. For architects, that underscores the importance of understanding retrofit, adaptation and end‑of‑life issues as part of sustainability competence, not just new‑build low‑carbon design.

And lastly, the framework signals a shift towards more transparent and robust oversight of competence frameworks themselves, including monitoring and feedback mechanisms. Professional regulators, accreditors, training providers, insurers and clients are all identified as potential users of the Standard, suggesting that sustainability competence will increasingly feature in how risk, liability and professional responsibility are understood and managed.

Taken together, the competence framework for sustainability in the built environment, now moving into the British Standards Institute standards system, represents an attempt to make sustainability competence explicit, structured and measurable across the sector. It couples a strong behavioural dimension reflecting ethics, public interest, duty of care, learning culture, with a set of technical and contextual categories that span natural systems, people, processes, projects and performance.

For architects, the message is that sustainability is no longer a specialist bolt‑on but a core dimension of competence that will increasingly be reflected in professional standards, accreditations, CPD expectations and client briefs. Engaging with the framework now, and reflecting on how your own practice aligns with its behavioural and technical criteria, is likely to be a useful preparation for the evolving regulatory and professional landscape in which you will be working.

Watch this space for the official release of the British Standard. 

Let’s sum up what we discussed today:

• In February 2025, the Construction Industry Council and The Edge formally launched a competence framework for sustainability in the built environment, positioning it as an underpinning framework for discipline‑specific sustainability competences across the built and natural environment. 
• Later in 2025, the British Standard Institute Planning and Approval Team approved the proposal to use this framework as the basis for a new British Standard on sustainability competence. 
• The framework has two major elements: behavioural competence and a set of core technical and contextual categories 
• The technical and contextual categories are grouped under five key headings Potential, People, Process, Projects and Performance.
• Sustainability skills will need to be demonstrated, maintained and periodically revalidated, with role‑specific expectations mapped against staged levels of competence and used by institutions, educators and employers to shape training, accreditation and risk management.