An independent group of civil and structural engineers and academics, dubbed CURE (Code Updates for the Reduction of Embodied Carbon), will release a report in June to announce topics selected during its first 12 months of work to identify and prioritize provisions in current building codes and standards that, if appropriately modified, will result in substantial reductions in embodied carbon.
Led by University of Colorado structural engineering professor Abbie Liel and Ian McFarlane of Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA), CURE is tasked with examining the three major sets of structural codes in the US: American Society of Civil Engineers 7, American Concrete Institute 318, and the AISC Steel Manual, to identify and prioritize building material code changes.
The first phase of the committee’s work, launched at the Structural Engineering Institute’s 2025 conference held at the University of Colorado Boulder campus last June, has focused on mapping out a roadmap for future research.
Liel says the committee began with a brainstorming phase, eventually identifying more than 80 potential topics. “We then narrowed the list by ranking the ideas based on their potential impact in terms of embodied carbon at both an individual building type of scale and at a large scale for provisions that affect many buildings. We also thought about feasibility: how much research is involved, as well as our perception of the appetite for code and standards committees to be willing to consider adopting these ideas.”
The group presented a snapshot of their work at SEI’s 2026 Structures Congress, held in Boston from April 29 to May 1. A full report, to be published in June, will announce the committee’s recommendation on priority issues, as well as what changes should be made to each of them. This list of priorities includes recommendations for:
- Reevaluate live uploads
- Develop a reliability framework for gravity loads
- Reformulate the serviceability and deflection criteria
- Improve the accounting of steel overstrength
- Improve fireproofing requirements
- It renews the proportion and curability of the concrete mix design
- Perfect concrete slab minimum resistance drives (PT stress, column puddle)
- Reassess seismic performance factors
The next 12-month phase of the committee’s work will involve identifying specific research needs and potential sources of funding. “Members of our team and others will begin digging into these topics to identify the right research team and raise funding to support the work and advance each of these topics,” says MKA President and CEO Ron Klemencic, who conceived the initiative and helped raise $200,000 to support the first phase of the working committee.
“While the initiative is motivated by sustainability and built-in carbon reduction, inherently less material has to be used to get there, and in doing so, many of these provisions will reduce construction costs,” McFarlane explained when the initiative was launched in 2025. “There’s really a win-win opportunity here that makes it acceptable.”
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The Charles Pankow Foundation is the lead funder of the CURE initiative and is leading the $200,000 grant with partners MKA Foundation, ASCI, AISC, National Council of Structural Engineers Associations, ACI and CU Boulder.
Since launching the initiative through CU Boulder last year, Klemencic says the Pankow Foundation has also sponsored parallel efforts in Europe and China to look closely at building codes for carbon reduction opportunities. “A group led by a professor at the University of Bath is leading an effort in the UK focusing on Eurocode and British Standard. More recently an effort has been launched at Tongji University in Shanghai, doing something similar with Chinese codes,” he says.
Klemencic adds that Liel, McFarlane and their team members are “out front [the international work] and sharing their efforts with each other so that they are complementary and can build on each other.”
“Obviously, there are big differences in the details between different codes and standards around the world,” says Liel, “but in terms of the issues we’ve identified as ripe for re-examination in an embodied carbon context, there are a lot of similarities in the issues with what we’ve seen so far.”
