Measuring carbon in cities and their buildings through reverse engineering of life cycle assessment

Abstract

According to the European Green Deal, excessive carbon emissions are the origin of global warming and must be drastically reduced. Given that the building sector is one of the major sources of carbon emissions, results imperative to limit these emissions, especially in a city context where the density of buildings is commonly higher and rapidly increasing. All stages of the life cycle of a building, including raw material harvesting, manufacturing of products, use phase of the building, end of life, all generate or reduce carbon. The manufacture of construction materials accounts for 11% of all energy and process-related emissions annually. Additionally, recent estimates indicate that over 80% of all product-related environmental impacts of a building are determined during the design phase of the building. These indicators reflect the urgent need to explore a low-carbon measure method for building design. This is here done using a linear regression Reverse Engineering model and percentage calculation. One of the hypotheses formulated relates Global Warming Potential (GWP) of −30.000 CO2eq or lower (around −165 CO2eq/m2) in the 25% of a block of houses, to carbon further reductions by 11%. This paper has identified barriers in terms of the databases needed to achieve this task.