In conversation with Rodrigo Fernandes, Director ES(D)G at Bentley Systems, as he discusses the importance of sustainability across industries and Bentley Systems’ contribution in developing digital strategies focusing on sustainable infrastructure.
Can you tell us about Bentley Systems’ Sustainability Approach?
We identify four core sustainability challenges that we can help the industries with to empower Sustainable Development Goals in their fields. These core sustainability challenges are Clean Energy Transition, Climate Action (including mitigation or decarbonizing, but also resilience and adaptation), and Land and Water resources. We put land and water resources in the same group, mostly because they link, you cannot think about water without thinking about how you extract the water from the land and the resources that you need to manage. And finally, it’s what we call Healthy Communities, or if you prefer Healthy Cities, here we include aspects like sustainable mobility to connect communities, by transportation in multiple ways. Addressing these four categories or challenges is really important for us.
In terms of our industries, priorities or investments, these core aspects are major part of our focus and discussions. And instead of going into each one of these, there is one aspect that we feel that is really important, which is ‘quick wins’, or ‘low hanging fruits. There are several sustainability outcomes we can achieve today with existing technology. With digital twins we can accelerate sustainable transformation by integrating sustainability principles like efficiency, circularity or accelerating the adoption of renewable sources of energy.
But of course, in parallel, there are some disruptive technologies that we need to support and to invest in where results will not be achieved today but at later stages. We still need to support these technologies of tomorrow.
I also want to emphasize the value of ecosystem collaboration and innovation as part of our sustainability strategy. We foster collaboration through our digital twin platform (iTwin platform). iTwin platform provides the foundation for building SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to design, build, and operate infrastructure assets. Built on open-source technology (iTwin.js), it is an open, scalable cloud platform for creating, visualizing, and analyzing digital twins of capital projects and infrastructure assets. It is promoting an open approach where users, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and digital integrators can aggregate information from multiple vendors, multiple sources, multiple disciplines, or even make their own developments, while keeping their own IP (intellectual property). So, this is really key for us, ecosystem collaboration is an important part of our sustainability strategy and our perspective.
This truly aligns with SDG 17 (partnerships for the Goals), and we think this will create a world where infrastructure digital twins can improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet.
Can you also tell us about your COP28 participation, what are your expectations from it this year?
For COP28, many of the points I mentioned to you previously are going to be important. And I think one of the aspects that is more relevant to us is indeed, collaboration and ecosystem partnerships. We want to emphasize the importance of partnerships and collaborations between private companies, public companies and international organizations. And I think that’s really an important part of what we do and we will be positioning the iTwin platform as a very important tool for collaboration.
The other aspect is, of course, infrastructure intelligence or intelligent infrastructure. This is basically the outcome of digital twin technology, which can orchestrate IoT, machine learning / AI, numerical models and other simulation tools. You don’t see people mentioning numerical models much but as a matter-of-fact numerical modeling is a very important part of what we include in digital twins. If you see the acquisition that we made for geothermal, what they do is numerical modeling. When we talk about flood simulations, again we are doing numerical hydrodynamic and hydraulic models here.
Everyone is talking about AI, which for us is nothing new. But of course, it will become more prevalent because we now have available instruments and capabilities like generative AI and LLMs. So, Infrastructure intelligence becomes more and more relevant for us and to the users working on various infrastructure projects. It’s making infrastructure more prepared and more capable of responding to the challenges of today and tomorrow, making assets more resilient, sustainable and efficient. So, bringing together digital twins, machine learning, IoT, and numerical modeling for data centricity becomes an important part of the discussion for accelerating sustainable transition.
The third point that I think is really important for COP28 is climate adaptation, this is a big topic to be discussed. COP 28 is not just about decarbonizing and finding solutions to mitigate climate change, but also about how we can help infrastructure and citizens becoming more resilient to climate change effects.
At COP28 we are expecting to see more alignment in terms of phasing out fossil fuel emissions, repurposing businesses towards moving to renewable sources of energy. We expect to see much more alignment in terms of funding and climate adaptation as well. The developed countries and the countries that have contributed more to climate change, should have the responsibility now to defend the less developed countries in this aspect. Last year, we saw great progress around climate adaptation so lots of focus will be on that as well as decarbonizing the biggest sectors that contribute to emissions.
How are Bentley users contributing towards sustainability while working on infrastructure projects and what trends are you seeing across industries?
Our users are the ones that actually push the boundaries around Sustainable Development Goals, not only because they implement the software solutions in real cases, but also because they provide us the feedback to improve our tools and to answer the questions that need to be solved. This year at YII 2023, we saw great stories aligning with water conservation and climate resilience across the world. We also saw interesting trends around collective and active modes of transportation and mobility, talking about the rail sector and new infrastructure projects around cycling, pedestrian movement etc. There’s multiple ways of integrating new transportation all together and our software helps do that effectively.
And finally, I think one important trend that we are seeing is the big push for renewables – for instance, renewable energy generation in China from solar and wind power. China has now 50% of the world solar power generation, which is amazing, right? It’s a world of contrasts in China, because they also have 50% of coal consumption around the world. But the fact is that they are generating so many projects around solar and wind and we saw that again this year at YII as well. So those three trends are really interesting indicators that we could extract from this year’s stories from our users.
Also, stories from our users are all always exciting in many cases and giving us really interesting feedback that we present here. In many cases each user creates their own industry solution by bringing integration of multiple products. So yes, our users contribute immensely towards their projects by working with sustainability and resilience in mind as well as providing valuable feedback to us.
