The FIBE3 CDT academics, industry partners, current students and FIBE Alumni, with extensive level of insights drawn from the much wider relevant stakeholders, will collectively create, design and deliver a novel, strategic and dynamic FIBE3 Roadmap. This Roadmap will provide an umbrella and a clear vision for measurable and focused research and training activities and enable outcome focused, system-based and community-engaged outputs from all the CDT activities.
The FIBE3 Roadmap will serve three purposes: as a component of the MRes teaching programme, it will help each new cohort gain an overview of the complex journey to future zero emissions infrastructure; as a framework of understanding, it locates and motivates PhD projects; as a collaborative development, it engages our industrial consortium and gives a new focus to our interactions with government.
We will build on the pioneering work of the Cambridge-led UK FIRES (Locating Resource Efficiency at the Heart of Future Industrial Strategy) EPSRC-funded programme grant Absolute Zero report (2019) and the more recent report ‘The Construction Sector under Absolute Zero (2022)’. The FIBE3 Roadmap will address both mitigation and adaptation, consider both aggregated demands and deployment rates and provide realistic pathways within current and projected constraints on energy, resources and emissions.
With our focus on the infrastructure and the construction sector, the FIBE3 Roadmap will be designed around the following four inter-linked 'net zero enablers' that will form the focus of our training and research activities:
(i) Existing and new/disruptive technologies
(ii) Radical circularity and whole life approach
(iii) AI-driven digitalisation and data
(iv) Risk-based systems thinking and connectivity
Our unique approach is to build a double roadmap mirroring the techno-optimistic approach of current policy with a technologically conservative map. This will help inform the government about progress against their own ambitions, anticipate future implementation timelines, identify and explore unrecognised opportunities for resource-efficient business and technology innovations, and provide a guide to evaluating and populating research priorities. Updating the FIBE3 Roadmap every year will build trust with users, enrich the evidence base, engage each cohort in the realities of infrastructure priorities, and build influence and impact.