Developing an Embodied Carbon Policy Reduction Calculator - Quantifying the embodied emissions reduction potentials of city policies

Abstract

In this study, four prototype embodied carbon policy calculators were developed and tested on three different C40 pilot cities including New York City, Portland, and Austin. The intent of the study was to prove the concept and functionality of developing calculators for estimating embodied carbon at the scale of a city and assessing whether this type of data would be useful for developing and communicating embodied carbon policies. The prototype calculators proved effective for estimating order-of-magnitude embodied carbon impacts of the different policies and were able to generate meaningful outputs that, with additional future research and development, could help inform real-world policy decision-making. For instance, preliminary results from the prototype calculators indicated that requiring reductions in building embodied carbon intensity was the most impactful for making city-scale reductions, followed by incentivizing adaptive reuse. However, multiple significant data and functionality gaps were identified as being critical for future development before the calculators could be applied in a real-world policy setting.