No one listened to engineer Anthony Pak when he first tried to explain the importance of embodied carbon to his Canadian colleagues.
“They were like crickets. No one cared,” says Pak, a Vancouver-based construction engineer and policy advisor.
Embodied carbon refers to the carbon footprint derived from all building materials, from their origin to their destruction. It includes all emissions used to extract and transport raw materials, as well as emissions from the construction process, the internal elements of a building and demolition at the end of its useful life. A life cycle assessment (LCA) is the scientific method used to quantify the environmental impacts of a building’s useful life.
Pak remembers returning home in 2012 excited after his master’s studies in Norway and encountering indifference from others in his profession. But since then, he has been working closely with building owners, designers and policymakers to spread the message through his company, Priopta, one of the first in North America to provide LCA and advice on embodied carbon reduction. .
Efforts to minimize emissions in the construction sector have long focused on operational emissions through interventions involving heating and cooling systems or renewable energy sources that make buildings more energy efficient once built, Pak says.
But if you’re designing green buildings with the idea of saving the planet and without considering embodied carbon, you’re missing half the equation, Pak. wrote.
The built environment, which includes the operations and construction of buildings and infrastructure, is currently the largest contributor to global CO2 emissions, generating around 40 percent of total emissions, according to a 2024 study. report of the World Economic Forum. If we zoom in, embodied carbon emissions contribute about 10 percent globally.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development reports That embodied carbon represents about 50 percent of a building’s average emissions over its lifetime, most of which occur before the building comes into operation.
“Embodied carbon is the blind spot of the construction industry. “It has historically been neglected, but it is actually a very important source of emissions and environmental impacts,” adds Pak.
Efforts to minimize emissions in the construction sector have long focused on operational emissions. Green building design that doesn’t take into account embodied carbon is missing half the equation.
Slowly but surely, through consultation with both public and private stakeholders, Pak’s perseverance to make embodied carbon matter in Canada is beginning to bear fruit. Consulting with provincial government bodies, Pak’s work has helped inform policy changes.
In November 2020, Vancouver City Council set a goal of reducing embodied carbon in construction by 40 per cent by 2030 as part of its Climate Emergency Action Plan. In May 2022, city council approved new changes to Vancouver’s building regulations to require designers to calculate, limit and subsequently reduce embodied carbon in some new construction. Last year, the city also released embodied carbon. guidelineswhich provides technical guidance on how to calculate a project’s embodied carbon benchmark and limit the totals that must be submitted to the city.
Vancouver estimates that reduction requirements could prevent up to 100,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year, according to the World Economic Forum.
Pak’s work in Vancouver is making a difference both nationally and internationally.
Vancouver is one of the countries that is most advanced in terms of implementing code requirements in North America, Pak says, so others at the federal and international level are definitely watching closely what Vancouver is doing.
At the end of 2022, the federal government introduced a new standard on Embodied Carbon in Construction, which requires disclosure of a 10 percent reduction in the embodied carbon footprint of structural materials in government projects.
More and more people in the industry are starting to understand the importance of embodied carbon, so the key question now is what is the right way to implement it, says Pak.
Last month, Pak’s efforts earned him an award at the second annual BC Embodied Carbon Awards. The awards ceremony is the first of its kind in North America and Pak was ultimately recognized for his dedication to the practice of reducing embodied carbon in the province’s built environment.