Focus Areas
The DiD Hub focuses on advancing digital approaches to carbon management across the built environment lifecycle. Our work is centred on four interconnected focus areas, supported by enabling technologies including BIM, AI, blockchain, and IoT.
Automated Carbon Estimation
The Hub supports the development of automated approaches for estimating carbon emissions in buildings and infrastructure, particularly during early design and planning stages when key decisions have the greatest long-term impact. By leveraging BIM, structured asset data, material information, and intelligent rules, automated carbon estimation can help project teams rapidly assess embodied carbon implications and compare design options more effectively.
Through the integration of AI, carbon estimation workflows can become more scalable, adaptive, and efficient, particularly where data is incomplete, inconsistent, or distributed across different systems. The goal is to enable faster, more transparent, and more decision-oriented carbon estimation that can support low-carbon design from the outset.
Carbon Monitoring and Tracking
Carbon performance must be monitored beyond the design stage. The DiD Hub advances digital methods for tracking carbon-related data throughout construction and asset delivery, supporting a shift from static estimation to dynamic carbon management.
By combining IoT-enabled sensing, site records, logistics data, equipment usage data, fuel consumption records, and digital project information, carbon-related activities can be monitored more continuously and more accurately. AI can assist in extracting and analysing information from structured and unstructured sources, while BIM provides a project-wide digital context for linking carbon data to assets, components, activities, and project stages.
This focus area aims to improve visibility, traceability, and responsiveness in construction carbon management, helping organisations understand where emissions are occurring and where intervention is most needed.
Carbon Auditing and Report Generation
Effective decarbonisation requires not only data collection, but also validation, accountability, and clear reporting. The DiD Hub supports the development of digital workflows for carbon auditing and automated report generation, enabling organisations to produce more reliable, transparent, and evidence-based carbon documentation.
This includes the use of AI to analyse invoices, delivery dockets, receipts, contracts, and other supporting records to extract carbon-relevant information and connect it to project activities. BIM and related digital data structures can help organise this information in relation to project scope and asset context, while blockchain can provide additional support for data integrity, traceability, and trusted record-keeping where appropriate.
The aim is to strengthen confidence in reported carbon outcomes and reduce the manual burden associated with carbon compliance, audit preparation, and sustainability reporting.
Carbon Trading
As carbon markets and carbon accountability mechanisms continue to evolve, the construction and infrastructure sectors will need better ways to link project-level carbon evidence to emerging trading and offset frameworks. The DiD Hub explores how digital technologies can support more credible, efficient, and transparent approaches to carbon trading in the built environment.
This may include the use of blockchain for secure and traceable carbon data records, digital verification pathways, and trusted exchange mechanisms. AI can support data validation and pattern recognition, while BIM and IoT can provide the asset-level and operational context needed to underpin carbon claims with stronger evidence.
This focus area is forward-looking and aims to contribute to the development of robust digital foundations for future carbon market participation, carbon credit validation, and trusted low-carbon value exchange across the sector.
Enabling Digital Technologies
Four core technologies underpin the Hub's work across all focus areas.
BIM
BIM provides structured digital representations of built assets and supports lifecycle-based carbon analysis.
Artificial Intelligence
AI enables intelligent data extraction, interpretation, automation, and decision support across complex carbon workflows.
Blockchain
Blockchain offers opportunities for traceability, data integrity, secure record-keeping, and trusted transactions.
IoT
IoT enables real-time and near-real-time data capture from physical assets, equipment, materials, and site activities.