How to make sustainability practices real in your projects

Under the heading ‘Projects for a Better Future’, the 2025 APM Conference, held in Coventry in June, put sustainability at its core. Gone are the days for theorising; the two-day event saw the great and the good of project management come together to understand how to put net zero and social equality at the heart of our projects.

Practical actions to take right now

Together with Joel Carboni, founder and President of Green Project Management, Nicola Lee, a Director at Deloitte, spoke about practical actions on sustainability that a project professional can implement right away, regardless of seniority. She suggested breaking down the project life cycle into four stages and highlighted low-cost, low-effort changes that align with existing frameworks – while emphasising that influence on sustainability can happen at any level.

“What can you all do as project professionals? There are lower-level, coalface-type things that can be done by anybody, regardless of where you sit, throughout the sustainable project life cycle and its four key levels. These are: the funding stage, running and managing the project, measuring and monitoring, and benefits realisation,” said Lee.

Everyone can start small

“The underpinning point is that a lot of these changes are relatively small – they are low cost, low effort and can be built into the existing change frameworks that you might be forced to work within as part of your organisation,” she explained.

“Some [organisations] are stricter, some firms or sectors are less strict – you are most likely to be working within a framework designed by your organisation. These adaptations can be made within that framework and be complementary to it, even if you don’t actually have the power to adapt the entire framework yourself from first principles.”

For example, when it comes to funding, if you’re not the budget-holder yourself, you still have the power to influence them, argued Lee. Do this by starting a conversation and asking good questions, she advised. “A simple, well meant, innocently placed question in the right ear at the right time can really influence thinking, and you might find that you are able to get your buyer to think about funding in a different way.”

Finding the ‘why’ of sustainability with Airbus

Cristina Mas, a Project Leader at Airbus, spoke on how to embed sustainability into the entire project life cycle, from concept to closure. She talked about identifying the ‘why’ behind sustainability early on in a project, engaging stakeholders from the start and integrating clear sustainability criteria into a project’s planning and procurement stages.

“In the concept phase, the triple bottom line is the most important bit. But why? Why is sustainability important for you, for the project, for the sponsors? It’s really trying to find that why, and putting that into words, which makes it much easier to engage everyone,” she told the audience.

Engage stakeholders from the start – and other tips

That’s the best place to start, but the other really important bit, Mas explained, is “engaging the stakeholders from the very beginning”. She listed other important tips for taking sustainability seriously in your projects, including:

Understanding how to really integrate sustainability into the planning phase.
Establishing sustainability criteria to measure that you are doing things properly on a project. How would you measure success in inclusivity or energy efficiency, for example?
Procurement is “such an important bit”, said Mas. “Think of your supply chain. Can you assess their sustainability?”
Consider the sustainability risks and opportunities that lie ahead of you and beyond the planning you have done.
Use sustainability audits to measure performance against criteria. “Transparent reporting is critical in this,” she said. If your organisation already organises sustainability audits, can you try to see if it makes sense for you to use them on your projects too?
When it comes the final stages of a project, and its handover and closure, decide whether it has met the sustainability benefits you had planned to deliver. It could be delivering a 20% reduction in carbon emissions, for example – something that is measurable.
In the handover, is there any sustainability documentation that can help? Less clear cut is understanding whether there are any residual sustainability risks or opportunities that you weren’t able to tackle in the project, but that will be important for the future.
Finally, are there any lessons on sustainability from the project that can be captured and learned?

For more practical advice and lessons, listen to APM Podcast’s episode ‘Sustainability starts with you: lessons from the APM Conference 2025’ or on your podcast app of choice.