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Contributed Talk

Session: : Climate Change: Biogeochemical Cycles 3

COS 210-1 - Carbon Conscience: Using published emission and sequestration rates to iteratively estimate the carbon cost of development

Wednesday, August 9, 2023
3:30 PM – 3:45 PM PDT
Location: B116
Abstract: Across the design industry, professionals are grappling with how to meaningfully address global climate change in their work. With building and construction contributing an estimated 39% of global carbon emissions in 2019, designers have recently recognized the need to account for the carbon costs of construction, as even high-performance facilities have traditionally focused only on minimizing operational carbon costs. Until recently, landscape design and planning disciplines had not been part of this architect-led discussion; an oversight, as only in the living landscape can we design and plan for economically viable carbon sinks, or carbon negative design, in the urban landscape. In design rhetoric, carbon negative design through planting is often overstated or poorly understood, and the reality of landscape construction includes potentially massive carbon costs akin to architectural construction. However, existing tools did not allow for rapid iteration of architectural and landscape design that could be efficiently used to inform early design processes, the portion of the design process where the largest-impact changes can be made.


Here we present a summary of the research and development of the Carbon Conscience design tool (https://carbon-conscience.web.app/), an interactive design tool that assists urban designers in evaluating proposed planning projects in respect to carbon-related impacts. The tool represents the results of an interdisciplinary literature review on the current understandings of carbon flows in the built environment, including both industry tools and resources as well as academic literature. The key metrics per land use (landscape, architectural, and ecological) considered are carbon emissions, storage, and sequestration. This presentation will review the methodology used to determine representative sequestration rates and carbon-carrying capacity projections by ecosystem typology, and provides a summary of identified gaps in literature that could enable greater advocacy in promotion of ecological design’s contribution to global carbon drawdown. Narrowing these gaps will enable planners to broadly understand the comparative carbon impacts of design typologies, and heightens advocacy for greater dedication of land and resources towards restoration projects to counter carbon investments in architecture and infrastructure.

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