Property developers unite to tackle embedded carbon

Four of the UK’s leading property developers are calling on the construction industry to come together to tackle embodied carbon, ahead of the UK’s first ever week to raise awareness across the industry and propose solutions to the challenge of reducing embodied carbon within buildings.

British Land, Derwent London, Land Securities and Tishman Speyer, together with resource efficiency experts WRAP, are partnering with the UK Green Building Council to host Embodied Carbon Week, from 7 to 11 April 2014.

Embodied carbon is the carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the extraction, manufacture, transportation, assembly, replacement and deconstruction of building materials and products.

The issue is rising up the agenda and rapidly becoming a key area of focus for property developers working on new build and redevelopment projects. This is because issues of resource efficiency and resource scarcity are becoming increasingly important, the UK’s GHG emissions need to be reduced, and associated legislation or taxation is, in time, likely to be implemented.

However, the embodied impacts of a project are often measured and reported in different ways and it is becoming clear that industry needs to be joined up around how measurement is approached.

The week will highlight the importance of embodied carbon in the built environment, encourage collaboration on the different measurement processes and set out the next steps to ensure best practice prevails across both industry and regulation in the long term.

Paul King, chief executive at the UK Green Building Council, said: “As industry is increasingly getting to grips with operational energy and the carbon and cost savings that result from reducing it, the issue of embodied carbon has taken something of a back seat.

“But there are progressive businesses out there that recognise both the huge financial and environmental rewards of tackling embodied carbon throughout the various stages of the building lifecycle. The first ever Embodied Carbon Week will highlight industry’s current efforts to cut embodied carbon in the built environment and propose ways in which it can be measured and minimised more effectively going forwards.”

UK-GBC, together with its Embodied Carbon Week partners, are hosting a flagship event to address the clients’ perspective on embodied carbon which will set out their challenges and needs to industry to enable the delivery of resource efficient buildings. Entitled ‘Embodied Carbon: Seeing the whole picture’, the event will include a lively debate from each of the partner organisations and takes place at British Land, Seymour Street, London, from 8.30am to 11am on Tuesday 8 April.