As the push to reduce the carbon embodied in buildings accelerates, research, advocacy and industry groups are releasing guidance for local governments on how they can support the transition to more climate-friendly building materials.
Embodied carbon is the name for the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the entire life cycle of construction products, including the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, construction and eventual disposal. Building materials and construction are responsible for 11%. global energy-related carbon emissions.
The US Green Building Council and think tank RMI released a report Tuesday outlining key actions to accelerate the decarbonization of building construction in the United States.. Although it was aimed at industry participants, the report identifies a role for local governments.
“Governments must pave the way for embodied carbon regulation by investing in low-carbon public buildings and supporting research and market development of low-carbon building products and practices,” he says.
The report points to “an increase” in federal and state action plans and programs to reduce the embodied carbon of building materials. He points out that the federal government and some State governments have recently launched “Buy Clean” initiatives, which promote the procurement of low-carbon building materials.
“Buy Clean” efforts target high-emitting materials such as concrete and steel, but the report cautions governments to design these policies so they do not “unwittingly constrain carbon-reduction investments for these sectors” . This could put segments of the industry out of business without reducing the overall emissions intensity of the industry or even leaking emissions abroad.”
Steel and carbon will remain “important in building construction for the foreseeable future,” the report says.
Other jurisdictions have established financial incentives for projects with lower embodied carbon emissions, the report says, highlighting the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Embodied carbon reduction challenge.
The report acknowledges the concerns and assumptions that local officials may have about reducing embodied carbon. For example, choosing building materials with less incorporated carbon does not automatically make construction more expensive, he says. There is no consistent correlation between incorporated carbon and the cost of a material, he adds.
The report also addresses the sustainability of wood: while it has the potential to be a renewable building material and even stores carbon, wood can have high emissions and ecological impacts depending on where it comes from, it says. “The jury is still out” on whether using more wood will contribute to or prevent climate change, the report says, and the construction industry will need to learn to distinguish between wood products with good and bad climate consequences.
A separate report that Arup and the Natural Resources Defense Council published this month also examines strategies for doing so reduce the carbon incorporated in the built environmentexamining the issue through a political lens.
The report focused on California state government and local governments to “consider feasibility more practically and specifically.” In August, California became the first US state to pass one “whole building” incorporated the carbon policy in its state building code, which requires most new large buildings to reduce embodied carbon by one of three ways.
The report recommends that policy makers focus more on policies that encourage embedded carbon reductions at the project and building scale; Instead, many emerging policies address the carbon performance of the materials themselves.
“Creating code policies can steer designers towards more efficient use of resources which, when combined with material-level decarbonisation driven by ‘Buy Clean’ policies, puts us on a scalable path to zero clean,” said Lauren Wingo, Arup’s senior structural engineer. , in a statement.
Lauren Kubiak, a senior scientist at NRDC, said in a statement that existing technologies and strategies to decarbonize building materials “need political push to be more widely adopted.”
