The Australian construction industry’s approach to embodied carbon assessment: a scoping study, Living and Learning: Research for a Better Built Environment

The building sector is responsible for a significant proportion of a nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. In an attempt to mitigate these emissions, industry and government have been mainly focussed on reducing operational emissions associated with buildings, leaving the embodied emissions largely ignored. As operational emissions continue to decrease, embodied emissions will start to play a larger role in the life cycle emissions of the built environment. Several tools and datasets have been created internationally and locally within Australia that seek to quantify these embodied carbon emissions. However due to lack of information, it is unclear first of all how the Australian construction industry is currently approaching embodied carbon analysis and secondly what tools and databases are being used for this analysis. A survey was executed as part of the Integrated Carbon Metrics (ICM) Project that aimed to not only addresses this lack of information but to also inform the ICM project tool outputs. These tool outputs will seek to address these often ignored embodied emissions and aim to quantify the carbon fabric of Australia’s built environment