Sustainability Week 2026: Iain MacDougall on How RED Is Driving Sustainable Progress

As part of the TRACTEBEL Group, RED is proud to be celebrating Sustainability Week, an initiative that brings colleagues together to share knowledge, inspire action, and showcase the role sustainability plays in shaping our industry. 

For RED, it's an opportunity to reflect on how we're helping clients navigate an increasingly complex sustainability landscape. By combining our specialist data centre expertise with Tractebel's wider sustainability capabilities, we're able to deliver practical, forward-thinking solutions that create long-term value. 

To mark the week, we spoke with Iain MacDougall, Head of Sustainability at RED, about the team's achievements over the past year, the challenges facing the industry, and how RED is helping clients achieve their sustainability ambitions. 

What sustainability achievement from the past year are you and your team most proud of, and why? 

RED’s Sustainability Team has achieved a number of important global milestones this year, including achieving a BREEAM Outstanding certification, becoming an Accredited Environmental Sustainability Design (L1) Services Provider, and the delivery of a range of complex sustainability projects for clients. 

For me, however, the standout achievement has been our transition from responding to sustainability scopes of work to helping define them. As client expectations, regulations and sustainability demands continue to evolve, we have had to stay ahead of the curve and understand not only what our clients need today, but what they are likely to need tomorrow. Increasingly, we are helping clients shape their sustainability strategies from the earliest stages of project development. 

I am endlessly impressed by how the team has embraced that challenge. Their ability to adapt, grow and lead conversations around sustainability is our greatest achievement over the past year. 

What are some of the key initiatives your team has delivered that have helped advance sustainability in your region? 

One of our key achievements has been formalising our Sustainability KPI Tracker and Sustainability Project Management approach into dedicated client services. These solutions were developed in response to the increasing demands being placed on our engineering teams to adapt our designs to meet the latest technologies and regulations.   

By creating practical tools that support planning, reporting and decision-making, we are helping clients better understand their performance and embed sustainability objectives throughout the project lifecycle. 

The strength of this approach lies in the combination of RED's project delivery experience and the wider sustainability knowledge available across TRACTEBEL. Together, we are able to provide clients with both strategic direction and practical implementation. 

How does your team help clients become more sustainable, and can you share an example of the impact this has had? 

At its core, our role is to help clients make informed decisions. 

Sustainability requirements can often feel complex, with regulations, standards and guidance evolving at a rapid pace. Our job is to translate that complexity into clear risks, opportunities and actions that can be integrated into the design and delivery of a project. 

A good example of this was an 80MW Data Centre project where we identified an opportunity to prepare the development for future district heating integration during the earliest stages of planning. Without that early intervention, the opportunity may not have been considered. By reframing a potential planning challenge as a community engagement opportunity, the project team was able to demonstrate wider social value and strengthen support for the planning application.