Initiatives to Report and Reduce Embodied Carbon in North American Buildings

Embodied carbon emissions during material extraction, production, transportation, building construction, and demolition are irreversible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that the building sector must be zero carbon by 2050. This goal is highly complex because carbon emissions include both embodied carbon as well as operational carbon from heating, cooling, ventilating, and lighting buildings. While standards and technologies exist to lower operational carbon, global and North American strategies to lower embodied carbon are critically lacking. This chapter presents data collection methods that allow the creation of new benchmarks that will hopefully motivate designers to assess and lower the envi- ronmental impact of their North American buildings. A lack of consistent data is not only responsible for the challenge of including embodied carbon in rating schemes, but it is also responsible for the scarcity of available benchmarks.