CSR: Europe Leading The Sustainable Building Sector
Over the last 20 years, the building sector has focused on tackling the 28% of global emissions created by the operational phase of a building, the greenhouse gases pumped out by offices and homes as they are cooled and heated. Far less attention has been paid to embodied carbon, those emissions created during the building’s construction and which are effectively locked in as soon as materials like concrete and glass are created. However, since the Paris Agreement injected even greater urgency into efforts to fully decarbonise the global economy, policymakers and industry have recognised that the focus can no longer just be on the use phase. They have also started to look at the carbon emissions buildings are responsible for before use, from the extraction of raw materials to the manufacture and transportation of building products, and even those emissions created on the construction site itself, which together account for 11% of all annual global Carbon dioxide emissions.
While operational emissions can decrease over time through efficiency gains and switching to carbon-free renewable energy sources, embodied-carbon emissions are locked in as soon as the material is made and the building is constructed.
The issue becomes even more pressing given the world’s continued urbanisation, which makes it imperative that we start to find solutions to embodied carbon now, rather than continuing to build in the same way and with the same materials.
Europe has led the world in terms of lifecycle thinking, and looking at the before and after use of buildings, alongside the impacts of the in-use phase. In Germany, for instance, the German Sustainable Building Council’s certification tool “DGNB” has included lifecycle assessment for over 10 years and the market is now advanced in tackling these wider impacts.
Building on this work at the national level, the European Commission has teamed up with the Green Building Council network and other stakeholders to release the world’s first region-wide framework for assessing the lifecycle performance of buildings. Known as Level(s), the framework looks at a building’s overall performance in terms of greenhouse gas emissions through its lifecycle, alongside resource and water use, health, resilience and value.
Thank you for reading. Please drop a line and help us do better.
Regards,
The CSR Journal Team
