How companies and governments are addressing embodied carbon

While the carbon impact from building operations is increasingly being reported on and measured by developers and building owners, the embodied carbon characteristics of buildings (which includes extraction, manufacturing, construction and demolition of the building) is less often measured, though it accounts for close to 11 percent of all global emissions. That’s according to a new report from DWS titled, “Decoding Carbon in Real Estate: Strategic implications of taking a whole lifecycle approach.”

Though the operational carbon footprint of buildings represents the majority of a building’s emissions, the embodied emissions of a building account for between 10 percent and 20 percent of the building’s carbon footprint.

Yet, “over half the participants in the RICS Sustainability Survey in 2021 stated that they do not measure embodied carbon emissions,” and “no respondents to CRREM’s latest investor survey measure the trade-off between embodied and opera