HPCIC Innovation Challenge
Buildings as a Carbon Source
Why building the structures where we live, work, and play is harming the planet
Hi, I am Aleksei Kondratenko, PhD Researcher at Politecnico di Milano, and AI Intern at DBF. I am writing a series of blogs exploring how supercomputing and machine learning can be used to address the carbon impacts of the building industry. In this first post, we will introduce the climate problem and what role our buildings play in it.
What is the climate crisis and what has caused it?
Climate change is an urgent problem — The average temperature on Earth is increasing each year, making heat waves, floods, and other natural disasters more common and more severe — affecting humans and non-humans alike.
This is due, in large part, to humanity's reliance on fossil fuels to drive economic growth — in turn, producing harmful greenhouse gases such as Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Nitrous oxide (N2O), and Methane (CH4). I have to mention that the most abundant greenhouse gas in the world is water vapor, but it doesn’t cause a temperature increase, therefore in this series of articles I will concentrate only on the harmful greenhouse gases outlined above.
This article will focus on Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This is because — Carbon Dioxide, or simply put “carbon”, is by far the most abundant in our atmosphere among all harmful greenhouse gasses. For the same reason, it is common to convert the emissions from all the greenhouse gases into so-called CO2 equivalent (based on their ability to heat our planet).
Carbon Source vs Carbon Sink
Simply put, anything that removes more carbon from the atmosphere than adds is known as a “carbon sink” (more on this in part 2). Anything that produces more carbon into the atmosphere than takes out of it is known as a “carbon source”. Cars, farms, factories, and even buildings are examples of carbon sources.
Buildings as a carbon source
You may not expect it but architects and structural engineers are at the frontlines of the climate emergency. This is because buildings are one of the biggest carbon sources on Earth. More accurately, around 40% of total CO2 emissions are coming from them. CO2 emissions coming from our buildings can be divided into “operational carbon” and “embodied carbon”.
What is Operational Carbon?
Operational carbon emissions happen when the structure is built, it starts to operate, and the people are living in it. They come from energy sources used to keep our buildings warm, cool, ventilated, lighted, and powered. Since nowadays we mainly use non-renewable sources to produce electricity and natural gas for heating, around 28% of total CO2 emissions on our planet come from building operations.
What is Embodied Carbon?
Embodied carbon relates to all other stages of a building’s life cycle such as the production of materials needed for the structural system, finishings, facades, MEP, etc., their transportation to the site, construction, maintenance/repair, demolition, and waste disposal.
The structural materials for our buildings are usually either steel or reinforced concrete which leads to significant CO2 emissions from their production. Furthermore, the typical end-of-life scenario for our buildings is their full demolition, and the material reuse from one building to another is quite rare. Overall, embodied carbon emissions sum up to around 11% of total CO2 emissions in our world.
So What?
Constructing new buildings and operating the existing ones is a very harmful process to our planet from an ecological point of view. The problem intensifies given the population and urbanization growths that lead to the prediction of the building stock to be doubled in size by the year 2050.
This means that if we do not reduce the emissions coming from our buildings as soon as possible, we will face tremendous carbon emissions and consequent worsening of the climate crisis in the very near future. Even though, by now operational carbon is a bigger portion of buildings-related emissions, embodied carbon plays a much bigger role in the first decades of a building’s life-cycle.
Moreover, since we have an increase in renewable energy every year, operational carbon is expected to decrease significantly in the future. Therefore, embodied carbon should be treated and fought as much as operational one but it is not the case now. Nowadays, the majority of policies and green building certificates (such as LEED) concentrate on operational carbon almost ignoring its embodied counterpart. The biggest architectural companies are calling their buildings “green” completely disregarding thousands of tons of embodied carbon in them. It leads to a constant increase in building materials consumption such as a 2 times increase in concrete contribution to the world’s total CO2 emissions.
Fortunately, some policies regarding embodied carbon recently started to appear, mainly in Western and Northern Europe. Given the urgency and the importance of the problem some organizations and initiatives have been established to tackle particularly buildings' carbon emissions (C40 Cities, Architecture 2030, Urban Land Institute, and the World Green Building Council).
Conclusion
In this post, I explained the relationship between greenhouse gases (and in particular Carbon Dioxide) and the current climate crisis. You are now familiar with fundamental and simple concepts of carbon sources and carbon sinks and know why our buildings are the biggest contributors to global CO2 emissions.
How can architects and engineers address the challenge of buildings as a carbon source and re-imagine our buildings as carbon sinks instead? What does supercomputing have to do with it? To find out, stay tuned for part 2!
About the Author
Aleksei Kondratenko is an AI Design Intern at Digital Blue Foam and PhD candidate at Politecnico di Milano. With a background in structural engineering, he aims to improve the sustainability of the built environment through the most modern digital technologies. He currently works on AI and ML applications in structural engineering presenting his work at prestigious global conferences like AI in AEC and DigitalFutures.
About DBF
Digital Blue Foam (DBF) comprises an elite mix of designers and technologists from around the world who share a strong commitment to empowering a revolution in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries toward carbon-negative projects by leveraging data-driven, AI-powered, collaborative, and sustainable approaches. We embrace collaboration and sponsorship, and we thrive at offering customized solutions that make designing a hassle-free and intuitive process. To learn more about Digital Blue Foam, visit our website.
