What Is Embodied Carbon?
We’re seeing the effects of climate change and human-induced climate effects all around us—hotter temperatures, sea level rise, varied precipitation patterns, increasing wildfires—and greenhouse gas emissions from buildings are significant contributors. For decades, the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry has focused on lowering operational carbon in buildings by decreasing energy usage and increasing energy efficiency. More recently, we now recognize the importance of reducing our projects’ embodied carbon, which is the amount of carbon associated with making buildings themselves, including raw material extraction, manufacturing processes, transportation, construction, and their end of life.
One of the important things we can do as an industry is talk about these issues and understand them from all perspectives. In this video, I describe how operational and embodied carbon differ, discuss how we track embodied carbon on projects, and share what the industry is doing to address it moving forward.