Hi Gurus,
LMN is embarking on a 17-part series to explore a more comprehensive carbon metric via summaries of various topics with lots of link. This dovetails with many other efforts in the industry and will reference all the best stuff that we are aware of...such as MEP 2040, SE 2050, CLF stuff, Epic tool, CARE tool, Arch 2030 publications, etc. I will be posting some of the articles here for your comment.
Right now I’d love to have your expertise review the articles before publication. Each is 1200-1600 words with images as well…not particularly long. In general we’re hoping if you sign up you are able to read the article once or twice and make strategic comments, technical comments or whatever else you think of when you read it. You could also dive deep and provide more and better links, suggest re-writing a paragraph, or suggest another expert we should talk to. An approx. date is provided where you would receive the article and have around a week to provide comments.
Please provide your interest here.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10kfCsFPU9zZ7Y41fpPMlw_7eiO90ABe1JlkMPKX5wnE/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks!
Outline and more details about the effort:
FRAMING THE QUESTION
1 An Honest Conversation on Zero Carbon
2 Whose Responsibility is Carbon, Anyway?
3 Toward a Carbon Neutral Built Environment
FUNDAMENTALS
4 Buildings + the science of global warming
5 Carbon Emissions + Time
6 Energy Use + Emissions
7 Embodied Carbon 101
8 Carbon Offsets, Transparency and Honesty
CARBON IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
9 To Reuse or Not Reuse? Existing Buildings + The Tragedy of Demolition
10 Structure: Steel, Concrete, Wood
11 Is more insulation better? Envelope, MEP Embodied Carbon, and More!
12 MEP + Equipment carbon
13 Operational carbon
14 Cyclical Renovations: Interiors, Remodels, FF&E + Carbon
15 Landfilling new things? Materials and the Circular Economy
16 Site: Landscape, Parking, and Transportation
CONCLUSIONS + PROCESS
17 Applying Zero Carbon to projects
Sustainable design leaders in the buildings industry are drowning in sustainable design resources. Even dedicated sustainability experts cannot keep up with all of the research. In response, we have chosen to summarize very complex fields with many moving parts using our experience and reaching out to a wide range of collaborators. This is an honest exploration of a very near-term and critical problem in the spirit of failing forward and is not expected to be definitive or to include all possible information. We hope that this work is carried forward by a larger group after this initial series.
The goals include identifying robust tools to calculate and reduce carbon emissions where they exist; to provide methods where tools do not exist; and to provide questions and links to studies where no tools or methods exist.
Internally, we will use these findings to revise our Sustainable Action Plan (link) toward more comprehensive climate action within our projects and advocacy. While we set goals in 2018 that we felt were ambitious, our goals for the critical next years until 2030 need to be much more audacious and comprehensive.
This research couldn’t be done without an amazing culture of sharing that already exists in the sustainability world. We are beneficiaries of others’ sharing their research and have attempted to provide credit and links as we can.
Over the course of this series, we’ll broaden the scope of the Net Zero discussion to attempt comprehensive study of the current state of carbon emissions and reductions. The series will begin with a primer on the science behind global warming and the importance of upfront carbon reductions. We’ll take a look at carbon offsets, which provide projects with the negative numbers they need to claim zero impact and discuss the controversy around these numbers, and then we’ll dive into the built environment impacts. We’ll address the importance of building and material reuse, the need to evolve our structural systems, and the tradeoffs between embodied and operational carbon. We’ll bring in emissions typically excluded, such as MEP and equipment carbon. We’ll study the impacts of interior materials and renovation, which are often excluded from LCA frameworks. And finally, we’ll look at the impacts we have outside the boundaries of the site – of new transportation and infrastructure services that are required by each new project. With each section, we’ll be providing tools and guidance where available.