Infrastructure Australia has released the Embodied Carbon Projections for Australian Infrastructure and Buildings report, which features several recommendations on how the industry can decarbonise and reduce the embodied carbon in buildings.
Published on 15 July, Infrastructure Australia’s new report quantifies a baseline of the upfront embodied carbon in Australia’s built environment.
It finds that construction activity will produce between 37 and 64 Mt of CO₂e in upfront embodied carbon each year for five years to 2026-27. This is a total of 247 Mt of CO₂e over the period.
The report also shows that close to a quarter of these emissions (23 per cent) can be abated by employing practical decarbonisation strategies by 2026-2027.
Infrastructure Australia has put forward six recommendations to the Federal Government to consider in its work towards the reduction of embodied carbon from infrastructure and buildings. These recommendations encourage the Federal Government to:
- Develop a comprehensive national plan to promote the decarbonisation of embodied carbon in the built environment
- Build confidence and literacy to enable the uptake of low carbon products and solutions across the built environment
- Develop a nationally standardised embodied carbon measurement system, which allows for consistent methods to collect, measure and assess data about embodied carbon
- Agree and implement a common national approach to drive market demand for low carbon solutions
- Develop new methods for project delivery which share risks and rewards for innovative approaches
- Work with industry to drive national alignment on low-carbon expectations through performance-based standards and specifications and identify faster ways to update them
Read the full report at https://www.infrastructureaustralia.gov.au/embodied-carbon-projections
Image credit: pisaphotography/shutterstock.com
