Response to discussion: A framework for decarbonisation for bridge owners, engineers and designers

We are grateful for the feedback on our paper. We support the respondent’s view that there is considerable opportunity to improve our understanding of existing bridge assets, and increase our collective ability to reuse, repurpose and extend the life of these structures. We highlight this issue in section 4.2 of our paper, where we make reference to structural health monitoring, data collection and analytics. We support the view that greater use of data from archive searches, instrumentation and monitoring, and structural investigations can provide the evidence base to support better decision-making. The Net Zero Bridges Group (NZBG) is working on further guidance which will be shared on our website, and we encourage others to share their ideas and activity in this area. We welcome any case studies where investment in obtaining better asset data has been shown to lead directly to lower-emission outcomes.