UK consulting engineer Arup has announced at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) the creation of a dataset displaying the whole-life carbon emissions of almost 1,000 buildings across 30 countries and five continents.
The data, which was collated by Arup’s Zero software tool, is intended to promote better decision making by investors, owners, designers, contractors and regulators by comparing the emissions produced by building subsystems over the life of a building.
The company is asking for information from property, construction and building design sectors to create a larger data pool.
It adds that that data collected by Zero indicates the need for the need to highlight whole-life emissions at the earliest stage of the building design cycle.
Alan Belfield, Arup Group’s chairman, said: "Comparable and open whole life carbon data is the tool that will allow actors across the global property value chain to make better decisions about building decarbonisation – and to achieve significant emission reductions at scale and at pace.”
Nigel Topping, the UN’s climate champion for COP26, said: “The need to decarbonise buildings’ operational and embodied carbon is an urgent one if the global built environment sector is to contribute this decade to progress. We support Arup in its call for all non-state actors in the global property value chain to use whole life carbon data to drive rapid decarbonisation of buildings.
“The High-Level Champions are calling for all new and refurbished buildings to be net zero in operation and to achieve at least 40% reduction in embodied carbon by 2030 at the very latest.”
