Grosvenor's Heather Topel to join our all-female judging panel Summer Awards 2023

Above: Heather Topel, Director of Development at Grosvenor Property UK (Courtesy Grosvenor)

Future Cities Forum is delighted that Heather Topel, Director of Development at Grosvenor Property UK, is joining our Summer Awards 2023 all-female judging panel at The Haymarket Hotel in London this June.

Grosvenor Property UK, is a family business with a long track record of developing, managing and investing to improve properties and places to deliver lasting commercial and social benefit.

Heather has extensive experience in property, development and town planning, focusing on delivering large scale, complex development programmes.

Prior to joining Grosvenor, Heather led Cambridge University's largest capital project in its 800-year history, the North West Cambridge Development: a 3,000 home extension to the city of Cambridge.

Heather was previously a director of town planning at AECOM, where she led planning and regeneration initiatives across the UK and abroad. Heather is also a board member for the Islington & Shoreditch Housing Association, and holds an MSc in Urban Planning & Regeneration from the LSE.

Grosvenor Property UK has joined the UKGBC’s new taskforce, targeting a reduction in embodied carbon emissions.

Despite being a significant source of carbon emissions in the UK, embodied carbon is currently unregulated, and measurement and mitigation within construction is typically voluntary. However, the accurate and consistent measurement and reporting of embodied carbon is critical to ensure meaningful and credible progress towards our net zero carbon goals, yet it is currently only addressed by leading organisations, including Grosvenor, in the built environment.

To address this challenge, UKGBC is scaling up its activities to mainstream action on embodied carbon. As part of this work, UKGBC has recently embarked on a new project focussing on improving industry understanding and ability to accurately measure and report on embodied carbon emissions. Ultimately, the project’s aim is to drive the practice of embodied carbon measurement beyond early adopters to becoming common practice.

To support this ambition, UKGBC has mobilised a team of experts from across the built environment, ranging from developers, suppliers to academia which will be supported by two representatives from Grosvenor’s UK property business – Eve Bellers and Giovanna Tapia.

Working with the Task Group, UKGBC is developing two crucial guidance documents.

• Targeted at practitioners across the industry, the first document will provide insight into the development and use of embodied carbon data, as well as specific guidance to help Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) teams improve the reliability, transparency, and consistency of their results.

• The second publication will guide sustainability leadership teams to align their organisation’s Scope 3 reporting with embodied carbon calculations and increase understanding of how the two methods can complement each other.

Both guidance documents are due for publication in Autumn 2023.