PFI (MCA): Embodied Carbon Emission and Environmental Impact from Built Environment

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation – Mid Career Advancement (PFI-MCA) project addresses societal and educational aspects related to the Environmental Impact and Carbon Footprint of Buildings. At the societal level, the proposed integrated framework addresses the need for built environment embodied carbon and environmental impact assessments. By integrating different models to assess mitigation effectiveness of embodied carbon / environmental impact reduction, the approach enables the engineering analysis of public policies and socio-economic impacts. At the educational level, the project will support both underrepresented undergraduate and graduate team members. The knowledge generated in the project will be translated into experiential education modules that will be integrated into the core courses offered at The Keough School of Global Affairs Integration Lab at the University of Notre Dame. The modules aim to teach, train, and inspire the next generation’s design leaders who are engaged in sustainable design and construction. The proposed project is to develop an integrated ecological-technological framework and create a dashboard (BUILT4CLIMATE) to visualize the embodied carbon emission and related environmental impact from the building stock in the United States at the zip code level. By linking two detailed assessments—building information modeling (BIM) and life cycle assessment (LCA)—at the individual building level, we can scale up the results to model the dynamic of the entire building stock. In the United States, the lack of knowledge regarding a building’s embodied carbon impact exists at the whole-building level due to the lack of methodology, building-level data and benchmarks. To address this knowledge gap, our project offers several intellectual merits. Firstly, the proposed integrated framework will provide a comprehensive, quantitative approach to focus on embodied carbon and its associated environmental impacts. Secondly, the creation of a national building stock database will significantly enhance the quality and quantity of empirical data available. Thirdly, mapping carbon emissions from the national building stock at a more granular county level will offer policymakers and regulators reliable insights into hot spots and aid in comparing different development strategies. Additionally, this project will establish benchmarks for life cycle embodied performance across various building types at a national scale. Lastly, automating the BIM and LCA processes will improve the accuracy and speed of benchmarking. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.