Context
Established a first European baseline for embodied carbon from real building data, and a budget-based way to set targets against it.
Insights
- Assembled real building data. A European dataset of embodied carbon from assessed buildings, rather than from modelled archetypes.
- Derived a baseline. What the industry currently builds, expressed so that a given project can tell whether it is better or worse than normal.
- Proposed a budget-based route to targets. Deriving limit values from a carbon budget rather than from current practice, so the target reflects what the climate requires and not what the market already does.
Why it matters
A benchmark taken from current practice makes the average acceptable by definition. A budget-based target does not, which is why the distinction keeps recurring in the policy work that followed.
Project page: let’s reduce embodied carbon.
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