New Embodied Carbon Report Guidance

While leading professionals have understood the importance of addressing embodied carbon in buildings for some time, the wider construction industry has only begun to fully appreciate the significant carbon impact of building materials in the last few years. This market shift has led to rapid evolution in how industry addresses embodied carbon.

In the last year, a critical request from industry has emerged: the need for alignment in embodied carbon emissions reporting. In Canada alone, the industry has seen several critical drivers for embodied carbon reporting, starting with LEED® v4 (2013), the launch of CAGBC’s Zero Carbon Building (ZCB) Standards™ (2017), and more recently, the establishment of the federal government’s Standard on Embodied Carbon in Construction (2022); the Toronto Green Standard (TGS) version 4 with upper limits for embodied carbon (2022); and updates to the City of Vancouver’s bylaws to address embodied carbon (2023). Other cities are also embarking on embodied carbon reporting requirements. 

With the industry changing so quickly and so many different measures, alignment concerns have been raised by those operating under more than one of these reporting drivers. In 2023 five U.S.-based non-profit organizations addressed this misalignment by launching the Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization (ECHO) Project. Twelve other groups are now onboard – including CAGBC, forming a coalition working to standardize embodied carbon emissions reporting. ECHO works to drive alignment of standards and definitions, reducing complexity and motivating action across our industry. 

The ECHO Project has released their first two reports in the effort to bring alignment to our industry:

Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements: ECHO Recommendations for Alignment:

ECHO reviewed 29 commitments, certification programs, standards, policies, and benchmarking initiatives relevant to North American whole building Life Cycle Assessment (wbLCA) requirements. From this review, ECHO derived 10 minimum recommendations and six strongly recommended requirements. CAGBC is pleased that its ZCB-Design v4 already aligns with all minimum recommendations and half of those that are strongly recommended. 

ECHO Reporting Schema:

A data schema has been released to streamline data reporting, reduce inconsistencies, and support seamless data exchange across various LCA tools, platforms, and databases. By adopting a common language and structure for reporting wbLCA results, it will become easier to compare results across programs. This work will be useful if national databases for comparing wbLCA are created.

The ECHO project is being honoured with the Malcolm Lewis IMPACT Award at Greenbuild 2024.