RP2007 Journal Article: Integrated Carbon Metrics and Assessment for the Built Environment

One third of global greenhouse gas emissions are emitted from the building sector contributing significantly to the problem of climate change. While more work has been done on decreasing direct emissions from the operation of buildings, embodied emissions of construction materials receive little consideration even though they constitute a significant additional proportion of emissions. The main objective of this study is to harmonise different data and methods such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Input Output Analysis (IOA) and Material Flow Analysis (MFA) to accurately calculate the embodied carbon emissions of construction materials in Australia. This study will develop and streamline efficient hybrid methodologies in analysing embodied emissions of the built environment at multiple scales and develop a comprehensive database of embodied carbon LCI data for building and construction materials that will be derived from an economy-wide modelling framework. This work is part of the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living under the Integrated Carbon Metrics project.