The Exponential Growth of Embodied Carbon Accounting

Interest in the embodied carbon of buildings—the upfront carbon emissions associated with production of building materials—has seen a major spike in the last couple of years, which has led to increased interest in whole-building life-cycle assessment, or WBLCA. WBLCA measures the environmental impacts, including global warming impacts, of a building’s major components. For North America, the two most relevant tools for conducting WBLCA are the Athena Impact Estimator (a free software program) and Tally (a subscription-based Revit plug-in).

As an indicator of where the industry is with WBLCA, a BuildingGreen poll of participants in the Sustainable Design Leaders Summits indicated a dramatic increase in the use of Tally over three years (see graphs).