Carbon Leadership Forum Session Part II: Case Study Approaches to Reducing Embodied Carbon

This course will provide attendees with in-depth examples of how project teams are calculating, analyzing, and reducing the embodied carbon of their buildings and portfolios. The first case study will explore the tradeoffs between upfront embodied carbon “costs” and long-term operational energy savings on an historic high school modernization project. The project team will share how they evaluated several design scenarios over the life of the building and compared the combined carbon footprints to inform design decisions. The second case study will present findings from a LEED credit Life Cycle Analysis process that compared a ten-story mass timber building to a baseline concrete building, and achieved embodied carbon reductions of nearly 40%. This presentation will include discussion of structural system selection, concrete mix design, and insulation options from an embodied carbon standpoint. Lastly, the course will provide an example of how AEC organizations can establish internal goals for reducing the embodied carbon of their projects at the portfolio scale, and what steps can be taken to track and measure this across a variety of project types.

Course Objectives:

• Recognize what embodied carbon reduction strategies are available and appropriate to a variety of project types
• Understand the tradeoffs between embodied carbon and operational carbon, and learn about resources for measurement and comparison of these characteristics
• Identify the most carbon intensive building components and strategies for reducing their impact
• Learn how to apply basic embodied carbon reduction goals and project tracking at an organizational scale

Prerequisites:

Basic knowledge of sustainable design and embodied carbon

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