Navigating the Global Landscape of Embodied Carbon: Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices

Abstract

As the trend towards decarbonization accelerates and Whole Lifecycle Carbon (WLC) assessment evolves, different benchmarks have been established across the world. While most methodologies adhere to EN 15978, various regional scopes have been defined. In this paper, it summarized the global landscape related to WLC assessment, including guidelines and policies. And it collects various multinational assets companies' Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) or sustainability reports to examine how they declare their carbon targets and what their approaches are on WLC calculation. The study revealed that most companies did not clearly mention what life cycle stages are included in WLC assessment. Even some companies conducted quite multiple WLC calculations, inconsistencies were found in the reports, for example - variation in life cycle stages, service life, concerned building materials etc. As a result, it is difficult for a company to compare the performance from one asset to another, let alone from outsiders to compare the performance of one company to another. Hence, this paper has developed a systematic approach to illustrate how multinational assets companies could develop a standardizable benchmark based on a variety of WLC landscape across the globe and would like to suggest a common methodology for evaluating their development's WLC carbon emissions. And it is also noteworthy for investors and practitioners to adopt the same approach to evaluate the companies' performance on WLC for fair comparisons.