Urban embodied carbon assessment: methodology and insights from analyzing over a million buildings in Chicago

Abstract

Confronting climate change, this study quantifies the embodied carbon emissions from the building sector—an overlooked yet significant contributor to urban carbon emissions. Through a novel empirical framework, the embodied carbon of Chicago’s building stock was assessed and visualized, providing a scalable template for other cities with comparable datasets. The analysis encompasses 1,010,840 buildings and identifies 157 architectural archetypes. This methodology facilitates the granular evaluation of embodied carbon, guiding strategic urban carbon mitigation planning. establishes visual analytics tools for informed policymaking. The geospatially resolved findings identify emissions-intensive zones showing that majority of emissions are concentrated in specific archetypes and geographic areas, delivering actionable data for urban development stakeholders. The findings reveal that increasing the building lifespan to 80 years with a 20% reduction in building sizes can decrease carbon emissions to one-third of the current value. The research harnesses the Excel 3D Map tool for emissions visualization, offering an intuitive understanding of urban emissions’ spatial dynamics and highlighting key areas for intervention. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis explores the repercussions of end-life thresholds and building sizes on projected emissions. This multifaceted approach enhances the capacity for data-driven, low-carbon urban planning, paving the way for cities to align with global decarbonization goals and laying the groundwork for a versatile embodied carbon assessment methodology. This study contributes to the existing literature by creating a transferable framework for measuring embodied carbon in building stocks, providing detailed geo-accurate data for urban planners and policymakers, and offering benchmarks and visualizations for assessing and understanding embodied carbon performance and mitigation in urban environments, exemplified by the city of Chicago.