To meet the ambitious climate targets ahead, designers, developers, and construction firms need common standards. And soon.
By Timothy A. Schuler
As municipal governments, developers, universities, and corporations begin to collect emissions data, either voluntarily or to comply with local regulations, experts say that the building sector will need better standards for reporting embodied carbon data. “We need to be aligned at the highest levels of guidance and leadership, or else it’s going to lose its impact,” says Pamela Conrad, ASLA, the founder of Climate Positive Design and the creative force behind Pathfinder, a free carbon calculator designed for landscape architects (see “The Plus Side,” LAM, October 2020).
Currently, design professionals who have climate commitments lack a standardized way to report embodied carbon emissions, which prevents owners from being able to quickly and easily get a full picture of a project’s carbon footprint. “There’s different tools, and they all report data a little bit differently,” says Kate Simonen, a professor of architecture at the University of Washington and the founding director of the Carbon Leadership Forum. Reporting methodologies can vary based on the unit of measurement, estimated project life span, or how a project’s area is defined. “For example, a landscape project could talk about the carbon footprint of the concrete used per cubic yard. They could talk about the total carbon footprint of the concrete used. Or they could talk about the average carbon footprint per yard of landscape covered,” Simonen says.
The Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization (ECHO) Project is an industry effort to standarize embodied carbon reporting across carbon calculators, rating systems, and other platforms. The group, which is led by the Carbon Leadership Forum, Architecture 2030, Building Transparency, the U.S. Green Building Council, and the International Living Future Institute, is developing a framework for embodied carbon reporting that can be used by all the members of a project team and will include agreed-upon definitions, units of measurement, and more.
Simonen says the industry representation within the group is unique. Among the participants are advocacy organizations, such as Climate Positive Design, as well as national professional associations, including the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Institute of Architects, and the American Society of Civil Engineers. “I don’t know of any other place where you’ve got this diversity of building sector actors coming together with an aim of helping to align and move forward,” she says.
The ECHO Project held its inaugural meeting in Seattle in March 2023. In September, it announced it had completed a draft framework, which is currently being circulated among participating organizations for review. Simonen says a public version of the framework is expected to be released sometime in 2024.
A soon-to-be-released standard for embodied carbon reporting for mechanical systems—developed by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers and the International Code Council—is also calling for a global standardized approach to emissions reporting. “What is really exciting is that this is a venue to share with the participants of ECHO the details of these emerging standards, and then be able to develop responses to those standards that are informed,” Simonen says.
Christopher Ng-Hardy, ASLA—a senior associate at Sasaki who developed Carbon Conscience, a design analysis application for carbon—says he hopes the industrywide alignment of embodied carbon reporting will further advance carbon accounting in design software. “I would love to see Land F/X have a way to export embodied carbon schedules, like you can export your reference note schedules. I would love to see Revit tools for landscape that have this kind of data,” Ng-Hardy says. “Hopefully, one of the things we get out of formalizing these reporting standards is more innovation.”