LOWCARBON BUILDING
Katherine believes that the focus on embodied carbon in buildings is distracting. Instead, she says that operational carbon is the key and that developers have amajor role in lowering these emissions
Wemust not lose focus Katherine Deas discusseswhy developersmust concentrate on operational rather than embodied carbon
Reducing carbon embodied in our buildings, specifically the carbon in building materials, has been a hot topic since the launch of the government’s Low Carbon Construction Action Plan, with its target of setting a standard way ofmeasuring embodied carbon.
I
Katherine Deas is Managing Director of Low CarbonWorkplace Ltd, carbon adviser to the UK’s low carbon commercial property initiative, the Low CarbonWorkplace Fund. For more information, visit:
lowcarbonworkplace.com.
absolutely applaud this; any move to cut carbon in the build – including
refurbishment – process deserves support. Yet I would caution any attempt to position embodied carbon as our next challenge as if it is ‘job done’ on curtailing the day-to-day carbon emissions from our buildings. That is simply not the case. The latest figures on global
carbon dioxide emissions for 2010 from the US Department of Energy in November make alarming reading, reporting that the world’s CO2
emissions
jumped by the largest ever amount in a single year, from 31.6 billion tons to 33.5 billion tons.Whilst China and the USA are the biggest offenders, it
24 | British Builder & Developer |
BritishBuilder.co.uk
provides a laser-like focus on today’s most urgent problem – cutting the day-to-day operational emissions from the buildings we already have. The good news is that developers have a massive influence over this, and stand to secure real capital value in the process. Firstly, we need to put things
in perspective. Non-domestic buildings account for almost one fifth (18 per cent) of the UK’s total carbon footprint and half of those buildings being used today will still be standing and in use in 2050. Of today’s building stock, 98 per cent is more than five years old. Reducing the carbon embodied in materials will not make a significant impact here, as we estimate that embodied carbon can account for as little as 10 per cent of the vast majority of buildings’ whole life carbon emissions.
MEASURING CARBON A reasonable proxy in the measurement of embodied carbon in a building is that every square metre of floor space will have an embodied
carbon footprint of one tonne of CO2
. This should be compared
against a median operational emissions footprint of some 150kg CO2
per square metre per
year in a private-sector office building. Even if the building’s lifetime
were as little as 25 years, embodied carbon would account for only 20 per cent of the building’s whole life carbon emissions. In practice, building lifetimes are very much longer. Even taking into account accelerating refit and fit-out cycles, it is perhaps more reasonable and realistic to expect embodied carbon to account for between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of a building’s whole life emissions, with operational carbon accounting for between 85 per cent and 90 per cent of emissions. Some will take issue with these figures I’m sure, so to put aside relative percentages it is indisputable that, today, the vast majority of carbon emissions result from day-to-day operation for the vast majority of property. And with new build running at
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