“The Future is Happening Now – Are we Ready for It?” This was the tag line for this years ‘Build It’, Aberdeen’s Construction and Property Conference which Yunming Thomson attended on 17th November at the P&J Live.

A programme promising insight into very topical subjects within the building industry focused on low carbon, addressing the skills shortage, health and wellbeing and Retrofit.

The opening keynote from Allan Smith of Morrison Construction set the tone for the day on the need for reducing embodied and operational carbon, but how do we go about doing this? CITB gave us insight into what they were doing to upskill the workforce, Turner & Townsend described their bespoke carbon calculator for measuring embodied carbon in building projects and Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce outlined the importance of feeding into the circular economy.

After lunch, Tracy Black, Scotland Director of CBI pulled out all the stops to give us an update on the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement and what this would mean to our lives. She gave some excellent examples of business collaboration in a local context too.

The Retrofit session from Gordon Nelson, Federation of Master Builders, Robert Gordon University and NESFIT rounded off the day and it was good to see how Retrofit is being rolled out locally in Aberdeen.

Yunming commended the audience for the brilliant questions – especially the one about solving climate change in China!