HPA Webinar Series | Embodied Carbon in the Built Environment/

Buildings are responsible for almost 40% of all energy and process related greenhouse gas emissions globally. This is made up of operational emissions (lighting, heating, cooling and small loads), and embodied emissions from materials, component manufacture, transportation and construction of our buildings. Our focus on building emissions in Australia has been almost exclusively focussed on operations, which means we have neglected understanding, measuring and most importantly reducing embodied carbon.

This presentation charts the importance of embodied carbon in the built environment in Australia and globally. It demonstrates how ignoring embodied carbon means it will be impossible to meet our future climate targets. In doing so it presents some of the embodied carbon research projects completed and ongoing at UNSW Built Environment. It concludes with research that documents the different pathways to achieve net zero operational and embodied emissions in Australia’s residential and commercial buildings by 2050.

Philip Oldfield is Head of School at UNSW Built Environment. His research interests are sustainable design, lifecycle thinking, tall building architecture, and climate literacy in architectural education. He is Chief Investigator on research projects with total funding in the order of $800k and author of ‘The Sustainable Tall Building: A Design Primer’ published by Routledge. Philip is a British Science Association Media Fellow, and has spent time working at The Guardian, writing for the Science and Environment teams. He has a regular contributor to Dezeen, Architecture Australia, The Architects’ Journal and many other publications.