Rethinking sustainability in the age of AI and automation
By Emily Slupek, Director, Building & Project Consultancy, Savills, and Dan Jestico, Director, Savills Earth
As technology reshapes how we design and operate scientific facilities, does the industry’s current approach to sustainability remain fit for purpose?
Alongside industry peers, we’ve been deliberating a fundamental question: As laboratories become increasingly advanced, how do we promote true sustainability in the emerging science spaces of tomorrow?
The future laboratory challenge
Laboratories have always been among the most resource-intensive building types, but increasing levels of automation, robotics and AI-driven research processes are likely to create further demands that challenge traditional sustainability frameworks and benchmarks. Future science spaces are likely to require:
- Significantly higher power capacities to support advanced computing, automation and AI workloads.
- Increased floor loading to accommodate larger quantities of robotic and automated equipment.
- More stringent vibration control requirements for highly sensitive instrumentation.
- Continuous 24/7 operation rather than traditional working hours.
- Enhanced amenities and welfare facilities to support round-the-clock human occupancy.
- Higher cooling loads from the increase in heat-generating machines and equipment
All of these will reduce the ability to meet longstanding sustainability benchmarks relating to both operational and embodied carbon, and associated accreditations.
Yet these facilities may be essential to future scientific progress. This raises an important consideration: if laboratory requirements fundamentally change, should we be more flexible in how their sustainability is assessed?
The gap between current metrics and reality
A highly sustainable building, designed to incorporate the latest innovations in embodied carbon, renewable energy and operational efficiency could play host to scientific and research activities with high energy consumption requirements. In this case, it is still possible to obtain high BREEAM ratings for such buildings, as they’re not penalised by the activities occurring within them.
However, the recently released UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard uses sectoral benchmarks to limit embodied carbon and operational energy usage, amongst other criteria. The UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard has fixed limits for embodied carbon and energy use in science and technology buildings – figures which actually reduce over future years to reflect anticipated changes to technology and innovations in structural systems and building services.
While rigid targets such as these have helped drive positive change to date, it may become increasingly difficult to apply them to highly specialised and rapidly evolving scientific spaces that have higher energy consumption, more infrastructure, and run around-the-clock. Changes to the way we design and operate laboratories may cause these benchmarks to be rapidly outdated and current sustainability standards may struggle to accommodate the diversity and uncertainty of future laboratory environments.
Measuring what matters
Rather than applying increasingly stringent requirements, there may be merit in moving towards a more bespoke sustainability framework approach that evaluates buildings against a set of client-derived criteria that reflects their material sustainability objectives, site constraints and opportunities, local stakeholder requirements and operational realities. The criteria should also respond to the building’s intended use, long-term adaptability and overall lifecycle value, and avoid penalising developments suited to accommodate intensive and future-proofed science operations.
This does not mean abandoning accreditation entirely. In fact, clear recognition remains essential to incentivise investment and reward ambition. Existing sustainability accreditation systems like BREEAM and LEAF, which guide energy efficient lab equipment selection, can still be used to demonstrate sustainability performance to key stakeholders and incentivise improvement, informed by expert judgement rather than purely prescriptive metrics.
Longevity: the missing sustainability metric?
One of the most powerful themes that emerged from our discussions is the need to place greater emphasis on longevity and adaptability.
Technology changes rapidly and we are in an era of exponential advancements. Building shells often remain in use for decades, while scientific equipment, research processes and tenant requirements can evolve dramatically in this time.
Laboratories that achieve excellent sustainability credentials, either based on existing or bespoke frameworks, should not require extensive refurbishment or become functionally obsolete within a relatively short period if the science and equipment they contain develops over time. A building that is designed to adapt to multiple generations of scientific advancement will result in a far more sustainable outcome over its lifespan.
Perhaps the encouragement of formal longevity and adaptability strategies as part of the development process, a more science-focused version of the BREEAM credit for functional adaptability, could encourage design teams to think beyond initial compliance and focus on long-term resilience, flexibility and value?
Designing for adaptation
If longevity becomes a key sustainability objective, the need to reframe design approaches around building adaptation and reuse emerges.
The need to design in layers (with different replacement strategies and cycles for different elements of the building, covering site, structure, façade, services, layout and fitout) builds circular thinking into the design process. The concept has already been widely adopted for office buildings with more flexible uses and is being increasingly considered for more complex laboratories.
Adaptability includes the ability to accommodate different tenancies and uses over time. This may be achieved through the adaptability of the building itself, for example flexibility in slab-to-slab heights, loading capacity, structural grids, vibration response factors, as well as a considered servicing strategy. Central plant and services distribution design allowing for multiple future modifications and expansion over time can increase flexibility to accommodate unforeseen needs and improve the usable life of the building before requiring extensive refurbishment. MEP systems that enable specific areas to be isolated without affecting others provide resilience and minimise disruption, cost and structural adaptation needs as uses change.
These measures may increase capital expenditure, and indeed embodied carbon initially, but they can generate substantial environmental benefits throughout the building’s lifespan.
Looking ahead
Ultimately, it feels like we need to move towards a broader shift in thinking.
To date, the sustainability of specialised laboratories has been defined according to generic building assessment certification standards. That approach has delivered significant benefits and will continue to play an important role.
However, as AI, automation and scientific technologies reshape laboratory environments, sustainability expectations and assessment may need to evolve alongside them.
The most sustainable laboratory of the future may not necessarily be the one that performs best against standardised certification schemes. Instead, it may be the one that responds to site specific issues, reduced obsolescence and occupier specific needs throughout decades of technological change.
If tomorrow’s science is going to look fundamentally different from today’s, perhaps the time has come to reconsider whether our perspective on sustainability should change with it.
This topic was discussed at the Construction News Property Week Life Science Clusters Conference in June 2026, sponsored by I2SL. We’re grateful to them for the opportunity to discuss the issue with industry peers.
