Allocating climate impacts to facility management services : A case study of Riksbyggen

Abstract: With the acceleration of climate change, mitigating climate impacts in all aspects of society is key to ensuring a sustainable development. The building sector is responsible for a major share of global carbon emissions, and in Sweden about a fifth of national greenhouse gas emissions derive from the different stages of building operations. Currently, there are legal requirements concerning sustainability reports for organisations’ overall operations within the sector, and climate impact calculations for new productions and building materials are also common. However, for facility management services, which include for example service and administration connected to properties, there are no systematic methods for calculating the climate impacts in detail.  Riksbyggen is a Swedish cooperative company operating within the building sector and provides, amongst other things, facility management services to tenant-owned cooperatives and commercial customers. They conduct sustainability reports annually but have not yet evaluated the climate impacts from facility management services. The aim of this study is therefore to construct a model for calculating and allocating climate impacts to Riksbyggen’s facility management service supply. Employing a mixed-method approach, including a literature review, interviews and data collection, a model for allocating climate impacts is proposed. The model design consists of three steps: compilation of climate impact data, mapping of facility management services as well as an allocation procedure.  Applying the model to Riksbyggen’s climate impact figures in 2019, this study finds three facility management services (Regularly cleaning, Remedial maintenance and Bonum) with significantly large climate impacts. With the climate impact figures from 2020 published during the process of this study, the model is once again applied and provides a comparison between the two years, showcasing a slight difference in the distribution across the service supply. The findings further show that transports play a central part in how the climate impacts per service vary. Therefore, one sensitivity analysis and two scenarios relating to transport activities are conducted, corroborating the significant influence of transports on the climate impact figures per service.  Future applications of the model include incorporating the modelling results into maintenance planning, annual reports and product sheets, both for the case of Riksbyggen as well as other organisations. Furthermore, the climate impact figures can possibly work as a supporting element for tracking the progress of the SBTi within facility management organisations. Finally, potential uncertainties with the model design are addressed, as well as relevant future additions to improve the accuracy of the results.