Initiatives to Report and Reduce Embodied Carbon in North American Buildings

Catherine Elvire L. De Wolf
Springer, 2018
Chapitre de livre

Résumé

Embodied carbon emissions during material extraction, production, transportation, building construction, and demolition are irreversible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that the building sector must be zero carbon by 2050. This goal is highly complex because carbon emissions include both embodied carbon as well as operational carbon from heating, cooling, ventilating, and lighting buildings. While standards and technologies exist to lower operational carbon, global and North American strategies to lower embodied carbon are critically lacking. This chapter presents data collection methods that allow the creation of new benchmarks that will hopefully motivate designers to assess and lower the envi- ronmental impact of their North American buildings. A lack of consistent data is not only responsible for the challenge of including embodied carbon in rating schemes, but it is also responsible for the scarcity of available benchmarks.

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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/255272?ln=fr

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Catherine Elvire L. De Wolf
Springer, 2018
Chapitre de livre

Résumé

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/255272?ln=fr

À propos de ce résultat

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Imbalance and drivers of carbon emissions embodied in trade along the Belt and Road Initiative

Qinli Lu

A continuous growth of international trade, especially between developing countries, has greatly increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions associated with energy consumption over the past two decades. Given the more intensified intraregional cooperation and trade within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), this study aims to trace the imbalance of CO2 embodied in trade between nations in BRI and the rest of the world, providing new insights into the drivers of emissions growth by contrasting consumption, production and technological differences-based perspectives. Results indicate that the BRI contributed to over 50% of global carbon footprint and 92% of its increase in 1995-2015. The BRI was a net exporter of trade-embodied emissions, whose technological-adjusted carbon footprint remained remarkably large due to comparatively high carbon intensity. Geographically, carbon leakage has gradually moved from China and India to other BRI countries, especially to Southeast Asia, West Asia and Africa. Technological change was the key driver of emissions reduction, followed by the change in industrial structure. The growth in final demand per capita was the most important driver for the growth of CO2 emissions in BRI. Improving carbon efficiency remains a critical step for BRI nations to slow down not only emissions growth but also carbon leakage. The paper managed to provide novel insights into the carbon leakage in BRI by contrasting the consumption, production and technological differences-based perspectives, thus being able to better inform policymakers on region-specific low-carbon transition and global climate governance.

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