The Race to Net Zero: How to Reduce the Embodied Carbon of Your Projects

Earn 1 AIA LU

Embodied carbon (kgCO2e) is the carbon released from the total primary energy consumed during resource extraction, transportation, manufacturing, and product fabrication. Implementing data-driven solutions to better analyze their projects’ carbon impact is a rapidly growing aspect of renovation projects. In this session, we showcase the workflow for your next project with embodied carbon, operational carbon, and various methods through case studies on real-world projects.

Learning Objective

• Define the concept of embodied carbon, and improve baseline understanding of embodied carbon and its impact on climate change
• Compare the design decisions that affect embodied carbon reduction and their ability to reduce the energy consumption and cost of renovation projects
• Identify the current role the AEC industry has in reducing global carbon emissions and the role architects, contractors, and owners play in designing carbon-neutral and/or net-zero carbon building designs
• Showcase case studies that demonstrate net-zero carbon strategies and explain the business incentives of including carbon in design considerations

Nilesh Bansal

Director of Sustainability

Covetool

Nilesh Bansal

Nilesh is the Director of Sustainability at cove.tool. His primary focus is on product development, supporting research efforts and guiding the AEC industry in defining their organizational strategy for adopting sustainability as a key parameter to help them move towards data driven empirical design decision making. Nilesh strives to democratize Building Sciences for the masses, having a true impact in our fight against climate change. He also has a Master of Science Degree in Building Performance and Diagnostics from Carnegie Mellon and has served as a Sustainability Specialist on several large commercial projects.

Aaron Seward

Editor in Chief

The Architect's Newspaper

Aaron Seward

Aaron Seward is Editor-in-Chief of The Architect’s Newspaper. Seward is an award-winning editor whose career has centered on interpreting architecture for the profession and the general public. He was editor of Texas Architect magazine for six years and prior to that held several positions at AN, including executive editor. In addition to those publications, Seward’s writing on architecture, culture, and the built environment has appeared in Architect, Curbed, Domus, Metropolis, and other publications. He has a BA in Literature, Writing and the Arts from The New School for Social Research.