Honeywell, Arcadis partner to reduce carbon emissions in commercial buildings

Today, Honeywell announced its collaboration with Arcadis to provide tools and services that will help optimize energy use and carbon emissions in commercial buildings worldwide.

Arcadis is a global company whose stated mission is delivering sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets. The firm includes more than 36,000 employees in over 70 countries, all "dedicated to improving quality of life," as stated by the firm.

With an initial focus on five projects in various global locations, the new partners will jointly offer a range of end-to-end technology solutions to help clients and customers expedite progress toward carbon-reduction goals.

Per statements in a press release, for Arcadis and Honeywell, the new relationship strengthens the efforts that both organizations are making to help clients committed to improving outcomes related to ESG.

The partners emphasize that the new relationship is not exclusive, and both companies expect to add additional collaborations to enhance their offerings in this space.

As cited by Honeywell:

Data from the World Economic Forum suggests 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 unique but complementary services to address these shortfalls and will work with clients and customers to map a path toward lower carbon emissions, while also improving resilience.

Value proposition

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 showcase these efforts to internal and external stakeholders.

Honeywell and Arcadis will also formulate strategic goals for organizations that do not have access to asset- or device-level energy performance data.

Arcadis brings to the partnership a deep background in evaluating business impacts across programs and portfolios. The company's technology assesses ESG risks for companies by developing current-state assessments that analyze 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.

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

“The strength of Arcadis is our ability to help clients identify where change can have the most impact in their organization when it comes to their energy use and carbon footprint,” said Alan Brookes, chief executive officer, 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.”

“By combining our ready-now advanced building controls software with Arcadis’ expertise in sustainability assessments and roadmapping, 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, president and chief executive officer, Honeywell Building Technologies. “By drawing on our respective strengths, we can deliver more efficient and effective sustainability solutions for buildings.”

The partners' statement concluded:

Documenting and reporting sustainability efforts will only increase in importance as more and 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.[ii] Through collaborations such as this one, Arcadis and Honeywell are creating an ecosystem of third-party solutions and complementary services to help clients and customers worldwide reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions.

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