Photo by Roy Gaiot
To Canadian Municipalities and Associations of Architects, Engineers, and Planners:
Canada, as well as a growing number of its jurisdictions, has set necessarily ambitious carbon reduction targets as part of an increasingly urgent global bid to achieve climate stability. While the spotlight often falls on the transportation and energy production sectors, 40 percent of global carbon emissions comes from the construction and operation of buildings. We are becoming increasingly aware that a big part of the issue?11 percent of global emissions?comes from the embodied carbon of the materials that go into the new buildings constructed each year.
The AED sector is just starting to understand the immense carbon impact of building materials. To drastically reduce this impact, greater knowledge, and firm embodied carbon benchmarks and targets, must become part of building standards and planning policies that govern construction across Canada. Last fall, I headed a Masters of Architecture Research Studio at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto that aimed to find some practical, implementable answers. The studio was titled ?Towards Half: Climate Positive Design for the GTHA,? and was framed around the basic question: ?How do we halve the greenhouse gas emissions of Toronto?s housing stock this decade"? The intention of the studio is to catalyze a conversation around embodied carbon, and to expose student...