Don Davies shares a chronology of one group’s progress towards a climate-conscious future —the development of the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3)
The tipping point for climate change action has arrived. Things are moving faster in some places than others, but our clients are asking for action with greater frequency and our need to respond is accelerating. Tackling this world challenge is a positive sign for our industry, in part because of the effect it will have on how we choose to work together in the future. Collaborative, non-duplicative efforts are the only way we can achieve the rate of progress needed to meet such challenges. To share an example, the advancement of current industry actions on embodied carbon offers notable lessons.
Embodied Carbon
Eleven years ago, in response to a growing awareness of the impact that building materials have on climate change, a group of architects, engineers, contractors, and material suppliers launched an embodied carbon initiative. We called it the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF). The Forum’s mission was to advance the topic of Life Cycle Analysis, and to focus on reducing Embodied Carbon resulting from the creation of our built environment.
An early part of that effort included showing the importance of structure in climate conscious building design, and how we could work to reduce the embodied carbon within buildings. We sought to show how—through optimization and attention to material sourcing—we could reduce our growing carbon impacts.
One of the early CLF efforts was to focus on Environmental Product Declarations, or EPDs. These provide environmental information that can be used for double-bottom-line decision making, similar to reading a nutrition label when shopping for food. CLF’s objectives were not isolated to this group. The creation of EPDs started in Europe several years earlier. Also emerging around this period were groups such as Architecture 2030, the Living Futures Institute, and Athena. All were working on different aspects of the embodied carbon challenge.
Shortcomings and Impediments
Despite the early momentum, those focusing on embodied carbon quickly met with a siloed industry, one slow to act on the issue. Conversations about the carbon footprints of projects typically focused on building operations only.
The task of reducing embodied carbon was viewed as too complex, too confusing, and with too many un-cooperative parties impeding progress.
Faced with our limitations to move the mainstream industry, a self-assessment yielded four recurring impediments to AEC industry collaboration:
1. Hoarding: We often hold our best ideas close and do not share them.
2. Giving Back: We do not invest enough in industry-wide advancement.
3. Silos: Our industry has many siloed disciplines, making collective action difficult.
4. Persuasion: We are not great at communicating in ways that motivate others to act.
The decade from 2008 to 2018 saw slow and steady progress to develop approaches for measuring and then reducing embodied carbon. Finally, in 2018, there was a spark with the creation of the Embodied Carbon Calculator (EC3) Tool that became a tipping point for industry attention and action. While public perception of climate change urgency had increased, we realized more than heightened public attention would be required to transform an industry.
So, how were we able to advance an embodied carbon agenda so quickly in 2018 compared to past years?
A big part of the answer was in creating a “collective action coalition” to advance the tool, in a focused effort to address each shortcoming described previously. First, the Carbon Leadership Forum had nurtured an intentional effort to share ideas through a growing Network of diverse professionals (originally the Embodied Carbon Network, now the Carbon Leadership Forum’s Network). Second, we found industry partners willing to invest in a public good initiative. Third, we crossed disciplinary boundaries. Fourth, we learned to speak to our clients in a way that motivated them: EC3 offered a specific tool and a request that enabled action.
At its heart, the EC3 tool is a free, open-access database of EPDs that are easily accessible and sortable, that enables a better understanding of the embodied carbon footprint of different materials and suppliers along with associated uncertainties. By placing this information in one location and making it freely available, we encouraged real-time evaluations during project decision making.
Analysis: A Retrospective
How we addressed each of these shortcomings is worth understanding if we are to continue to act on climate change issues and address other topics of collective significance. EC3 has been an important step, but many more steps are still needed.
Hoarding: We often hold our best ideas close and do not share them.
Motivation for the EC3 tool came from a frustration that EPD information was not readily available, or comparable between the proprietary silos of different suppliers and industry segments. A traditional approach to the tool’s accessibility would have been to create it and then maintain it as an exclusive, proprietary, embodied carbon tracking system for those who pay for the information. This approach would have resulted merely in industry redundancy—a similar, but perhaps better, proprietary tool serving a similar purpose to other proprietary tools. That database of EPDs would have been limited and its data gaps and incomplete findings would also have been much slower to fill. Instead of keeping the idea close, the decision was made early to share the idea, make the data free, and bring in industry partners to make it better.
Giving Back: We do not invest enough in industry-wide advancement.
Creating a free and open-access tool meant finding funding to bring it forward. This was one of the biggest challenges with collective action: getting multiple parties to come together and put “skin in the game.” After proof-of-concept seed funding came from Skanska and Microsoft, the Pankow and MKA Foundations coalesced as the lead funders for the tool’s creation, agreeing that the Pankow Foundation would also work as an aggregator of funds collected from a variety of supporting organizations.
But taking on an initiative that crossed so many industry boundaries introduced unique complications and barriers.
Agreeing not to hold the database proprietary and make it a public benefit to all became a central organizing theme. There was a concerted effort to raise funds from multiple smaller sources instead of a singular source. Company support is powerful—contributing money into a collective “pot” gets leadership engaged and signals internal staff approval and encouragement to help advance the tool and its database of information.
This convergence became a significant leverage point. Many companies within the AEC industry have highly motivated people who want to work on climate change, but who don’t know if their companies will support their efforts, or where to engage to make a difference. We tapped into these energies to give back and to be part of something bigger than any one individual or company. That moved the industry, and momentum quickly grew because of it.
Silos: Collective action for a public good means breaking down silos.
The EC3 tool was the collective result of nearly 50 industry partners. The Carbon Leadership Forum incubated the tool and led the project’s management, up to its public beta launch in November 2019. In early 2020, Building Transparency, a new non-profit, was established by the EC3 leadership team. Building Transparency continues the management and development of the EC3 tool while providing resources and education necessary to ensure its adoption.
Bringing these 50 industry partners together meant breaking down our fragmented silos. The impetus for that came from recognizing a key principle: people get defensive when facing wedge issues with competitors. However, those same people typically have a desire to constantly better themselves and their organizations. They want to be seen as contributing to solutions, not problems. This led to a specific push at the start of the EC3 tool’s creation to only compare like materials against one another. Within the structural disciplines, this meant NOT focusing on who is the lower carbon offering between concrete, steel, or wood suppliers. Avoiding the concrete vs. steel vs. wood debate was fundamental to being able to get competitive parties to the “table of mutual benefit.” This led to the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), the American Concrete Institute (ACI), and the American Wood Council (AWC) each engaging. Getting these three, often competing, material-focused organizations to agree to work on a common effort — one that was bigger than any one of them — was a significant collective-action accomplishment.
While success came from the diversity of inputs and expertise, reaching outside of traditional silos pushed untapped abilities forward to activate embodied carbon reduction. Working groups that support the data assessment within the tool continue to bridge gaps of understanding, and to daylight the processes that have the largest carbon footprints.
The transparency that has come from EC3’s creation is rapidly leading to other industry innovation and action. Using the concrete industry as an example, we went from 800 to over 28,000 EPDs within the span of 18 months. New cements are now coming online that offer a 30% carbon footprint reduction from what was previously available. This momentum is also pushing other material suppliers to disclose data they previously did not want to share, and to innovate within their own spaces to keep pace. Knowing that embodied carbon is being actively monitored and that customers care about it is moving an industry to change. The EC3 tool also quickly moved beyond structural materials to include a number of interior and exterior finishes into the database.
Persuasion: We fail to communicate in a way that others will be motivated to act.
As part of the EC3 tool’s early messaging, we created a business case paper to highlight why it was needed. We focused on EC3’s value without getting lost in the details. We crafted our message in terms that an owner or business decision maker could relate to, in a way they could explain it to others. We made the business case for EC3 through several lenses:
• Social Responsibility
Decarbonizing the building sector by 2050 is a Paris Summit climate goal. Effectively reducing embodied carbon within buildings at scale, though, requires a fundamental starting point: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
The EC3 tool enables a performance-based approach to embodied carbon reductions, in design, procurement, and construction. It moves us towards a more responsible building sector for our climate-conscious future.
• Quantity Control = Risk Control
By focusing the design team on material quantities early and having them “manage to a carbon budget,” EC3 drives best practice project management and material “quantity control.” Using the tool reduces risk and makes design outcomes more predictable. This is where sustainability and cost control goals are complimentary.
Informed Decision Making
A robust, open-source, publicly available, material, embodied carbon database, easily sorted and statistically compared, starts to remove the mystery behind embodied carbon data. It allows for setting credible embodied carbon project budgets, defining a better design reference building, and a more consistent tracking of embodied carbon targets during construction.
Comparing embodied carbon footprints at the time of purchase allows for more informed decisions. Keeps control over choices about when and where to be more embodied-carbon aggressive to meet earlier set project goals in the decision maker’s hands, avoiding unintentional budget impacts from choices that may not be best value.
• Market Differentiation
EC3 is designed to help users select the low-carbon supplier within each material category.
There are significant embodied carbon variances within the harvesting and manufacturing processes of many commodity building materials. By asking for and comparing EC variances at the point of sale, the low-carbon suppliers become known and more likely rewarded.
• Industry-Wide Initiative
EC3 will only be successful if it is embraced by the building community at scale. Hosting EC3 at the Carbon Leadership Forum places it in a neutral non-profit that has a nationally respected presence and extensive outreach through its Embodied Carbon Network.
This prominence allows industry-wide participation within the trade associations, owners, builders, and designers backing EC3.
Making this climate change and business case was one of several keys to attracting attention within the tech industry, among other places. Several Fortune 500 technology companies have engaged with both financial and in-kind support. They see the value in asking for and organizing this embodied carbon data, and in creating a common system where the data can be more readily accessible to all. They understand that while even large, data-driven technology companies are motivated to move the building industry to a culture of data disclosure, collectively they have a stronger voice to make this happen.
A Work In Progress
Without question, embodied carbon reduction is still a work in progress. The comparison of EPDs that EC3 enables is far from a complete picture of a sustainable project. We still need to develop and improve on many other Life Cycle Analysis topics. Our industry is constantly evolving how it can work collectively. The SE2050 challenge and the way the structural engineering community is organizing in this space is another example of ongoing collaboration. The collective-action model deployed by the EC3 project raises the bar for how the design and construction industries can come together to innovate and evolve. Through collective action, we are paving a way to address industry carbon reduction goals.
Hopefully the lessons learned from this initiative inspire other industry partners to come together, to invest back, and to solve big problems by advancing big ideas. The thought leadership that brought the EC3 tool and its collective-action effort together included Kate Simonen from the University of Washington and CLF, Stacey Smedley from Skanksa, Phil Northcott from Change Labs, Anne Ellis of the Pankow Foundation, and myself, representing the MKA Foundation. This group was only the beginning of a much larger collective needed to realize success.
Know this: if you have an idea worthy of a collective-action initiative, use these lessons as a starting point. Seek partners willing to invest and engage with you to bring your idea forward. You just might do something good.
Don Davies is President of Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA), a 190-person, international, award-winning structural and civil engineering firm headquartered in Seattle. He is a leader in the promotion of urban density and low-carbon construction, with projects in more than 19 countries, and designs up to 105 stories tall.
As a leader in Embodied Carbon Life Cycle Analysis, Don is a founding member of the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF), and of BuildingTransparency.org, which hosts the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3). His work through the MKA Foundation is helping to drive open-source, collective-action initiatives around water and embodied carbon.