By Rodrigo Fernandes, Director Sustainability
Bentley’s Director of Sustainability, Rodrigo Fernandes, answers your questions about Bentley’s approach to sustainability solutions and how we support our users to meet their own sustainability goals.
I’ve heard Bentley talk about Sustainability and about handprints. Can you please explain what Sustainability is, what handprint is, and why it is important for me as a Bentley user?
At Bentley, we recognize that the growing threat of climate change requires rapid, unprecedented transformation. Creating future-proofed infrastructure plays a key role in protecting people and the planet. We use the Sustainability acronym to encompass two important focus areas for our business around sustainability.
First, when companies talk about Environment, Social, and Governance Impact goals, focused primarily on measuring a company’s environmental footprint – the organization’s impact on the planet. For us at Bentley, this means continually finding ways to reduce our company’s footprint.
Second, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focus on sustainable outcomes, providing a framework and inspiration for business policies and purpose. It is essential for us at Bentley to remain conscious that our most significant societal contribution is empowering SDGs through infrastructure digital twin solutions, helping our users realize more sustainable, predictable, and resilient outcomes.
We combined the two acronyms Impact and SDG to form Sustainability: “Empowering Sustainable Development Goals.” This reflects our purpose and brings attention to the environmental handprint (net positive impact) of our software and services. Sustainability is our most strategic priority for the next decade. As a showcase of our handprint, the website gathers 2022 flagship stories on how Bentley users are helping to address the United Nations SDGs through the infrastructure projects on which they work. More information about this can be found in our 2022 Impact report and in our Impact Overview.
What is the connection between infrastructure digital twins and sustainability?
We need disruptive technologies and innovations to help us succeed in decarbonizing and adapting to climate change in the medium- and long-term. But while the world needs to strongly invest in science and technology to promote these disruptive advancements, we should also start obtaining results now.
Quick wins can be achieved by prioritizing sustainability principles – like circularity, efficiency, and diversifying renewables. Infrastructure digital twins are among the most effective levers to holistically implement those sustainability principles. They can successfully advance those principles by orchestrating available technologies such as IoT, AI, numerical models, web services, cloud computing, and immersive visualization. All of them can be combined towards a dramatic increase in performance at all levels.
That’s why we say that infrastructure digital twin solutions and sustainable development go hand in hand. It’s a crucial step for achieving SDGs, driving climate action, and an essential part of accelerating the “double transition” (digital and sustainable transitions).
Our company established ambitious Impact pathways and aggressive Net Zero targets and goals. We are asking many suppliers and partners to help us implement those goals to improve our Impact performance. Can Bentley help us? How?
All our users can count on Bentley Systems’ commitment to continuously reducing the footprint in our operations. We recently submitted our Net Zero targets to Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) – a global standard setter – ensuring the highest ambition in credible, corporate, climate target setting. But while minimizing our own footprint is imperative for every citizen, organization, and even nation, our most unique and significant contribution to people and the planet is our vast portfolio of solutions.
Bentley solutions are used to decarbonize infrastructure, enable increased efficiencies and circularity, achieve resilience and asset reliability, enact multi-stakeholder engagements, and make better-informed decisions at all lifecycle stages. For instance, Bentley helped our users generate at least 18-20 GW in clean energy capacity – enough to power 20 million homes in the European Union every year.
We’re developing a network of industry partnerships to build integrated workflows that link iTwin technology with capabilities that assess embodied and operational carbon and environmental footprints, associated with infrastructure projects and assets.
Here’s a brief list of decarbonization activities, sustainability outcomes, and infrastructure sectors where Bentley software (with associated industry partners) is a critical success factor in various users and projects worldwide:
