Embodied carbon is the future of sustainable building. This session at the 2024 NABERS + CBD Conference covered the latest insights, trends, and strategies shaping the future of embodied carbon and delve into the realm of low-carbon building design, and the infrastructure that supports it.
A national standard to measure, benchmark and certify embodied carbon is moving closer to launch, with the call for pilot projects heard loud and clear.
“We know that embodied emissions are becoming the main source of emissions in a building, recent information from the GBCA indicates that embodied emissions are already reaching about 50% of the proportion of a building’s emissions,” said Katie Eyles, Embodied Carbon lead at NABERS.
The NSW Government seeded NABERS’ work to develop an embodied carbon tool for new buildings with an investment of $4.8 million. NABERS and the GBCA began collaborating in 2021, and more than 300 organisations have been engaged since then.
The decision to focus on upfront embodied carbon – basically the carbon emitted until the day a building’s doors open – was made because “these are the emissions that we can influence today,” said the GBCA’s Chief Impact Officer Jorge Chapa.
The new NABERS embodied carbon tool will encourage the use of Environmental Product Declarations. As not all building materials currently have EPDs, NABERS is launching a national database of emissions factors at the end of June.
With pilot projects already signing up, the final tool will hit the market by the end of 2024. The GBCA will reward project teams that pilot the tool through the Green Star Innovation Challenge process, Jorge Chapa added.
Meanwhile, the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC) has released an issues paper to “supercharge” discussion on the policy required to drive change. Launching the paper at the conference, ASBEC’s Executive Director Alison Scotland said 250-plus policies had been scrutinised, and solutions proposed across seven core policy “dilemmas”. Feedback is now being sought, which will inform a comprehensive policy framework for the entire supply chain.
Looking beyond Australia provides many practical examples of reducing embodied emissions through design. Thomas Hobbs, Design Director at Danish architecture practice Henning Larsen, shared insights into their design methodologies and how they are applied in practice. “It’s the liveability and quality of life that have become the icons of our city and this is something that we really try to think about when we’re working on assignments and different geographies,” he said. “By 2050, 70% of the world’s population are going to be living in cities and that means we’re going to need to build a new city for one and a half million people every single week.”
Watch ‘Building for tomorrow reducing embodied carbon today’ and other sessions from the 2024 NABERS + CBD Conference here.