Making embodied carbon mainstream: a framework for cities to leverage waste, equity, and preservation policy to reduce embodied emissions in buildings

With anticipation building around embodied carbon as a “new frontier” of climate policy, it may appear that cities need to develop a whole suite of dedicated institutions and mechanisms to support its implementation. However, to do so risks placing an undue burden on already overstretched local and regional governments. Instead, embodied carbon policy can build on existing priorities that already galvanize resources and attention and have benefited from decades of policy development. Making strong links to a larger urban agenda offers a way to forge buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders. Current visions for embodied carbon policy broadly fall into two categories: (1) material substitution strategies, or technical solutions that incrementally reduce emissions, and (2) demand reduction strategies, more transformative solutions that avoid emissions. Both of these areas have strong ties to existing urban strategies for waste, equity, and preservation. Foundations in waste policy include increasing waste diversion, expanding green demolition, and increasing material efficiencies. Foundations in equity-oriented policy include retrofitting affordable housing, workforce development for deconstruction, and building lower carbon, lower cost housing. Foundations in preservation policy include incentivizing building reuse, supporting the use of low carbon materials for retrofits, and encouraging vertical infill. Amplifying existing policy efforts can bring substantive embodied carbon reductions to the forefront, leapfrogging a long technical start-up phase for implementing stand-alone embodied carbon policy.