Urban Design Guidelines Embodied Carbon Study
The following study is part of The Atmospheric Fund (TAF) funded ‘Development of Embodied Carbon Management Toolkit for Ontario Municipalities’ project. The project attempts to address the following problem facing Ontario’s Municipalities:
How can Ontario municipalities guide the provision of more housing with a lower carbon footprint? Ontario’s municipalities have been presented with the challenge to build more housing faster and provide affordable housing options for all, amidst a climate emergency. Some Ontario municipalities have established green standards that now include operational energy and greenhouse gas emissions requirements for new housing and have yet to set requirements for embodied carbon from building materials which represents a significant and overlooked GHG contributor over the building lifecycle.
The TAF-funded Embodied Carbon Benchmarking Study and Policy Primer, 2022, revealed a number of unintended drivers of embodied carbon in the buildings surveyed. A review of built-form guidelines for various building scales, including angular planes, step-backs, below grade structures, and building materials have been shown to impact a project’s embodied carbon significantly.
The study also highlighted that low-hanging fruit exists to reduce embodied carbon through the prioritization of: reuse of existing
buildings and materials, followed by using low carbon new construction materials and through setting embodied carbon caps on new
construction.
This follow-up project will build on the previous study to develop an Embodied Carbon Management Toolkit for Ontario Municipalities. It will provide guidance on low embodied carbon urban design guidelines, approaches to incentivize deconstruction and reuse, and municipal construction design and procurement language based on analysis and recommendations performed on City of Toronto (CoT) current policies on these topics. The project will include training seminars to equip Ontario’s municipal staff to guide low-carbon development.
Lessons learned will be shared widely with stakeholders from othermunicipalities and the private sector. As part of the larger study with the City of Toronto and Mantle Developments, the following study of the City of Toronto’s Urban Design Guidelines undertaken by Ha/f Climate Design intends to provide a comprehensive illustrative summary of how contemporary Urban Design Guidelines impact emissions and costs to inform ongoing and future amendments to the City’s typological building guidelines.
