Designing with a Carbon Conscience

Award of Excellence

Research

Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Sasaki
Client: Sasaki

Design with a Carbon Conscience

Carbon Conscience is a web-based whole project life cycle tool that brings together landscape and architectural datasets to inform planning decisions.

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Advocate during planning and concept design

During planning and concept design, designers can set carbon goals with their clients, fundamentally defining and challenging the project framework.

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Understanding the construction carbon cycle

This work began by investigating the construction carbon cycle and existing tools to study embodied carbon.

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Material literature review

Research led to the development of a baseline material carbon factor literature review for 170+ unique landscape material and product typologies.

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Projecting land use assembly compositions

These materials were combined based on reference projects for an average land cover of specific construction assemblies.

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Understanding transportation costs

For many common landscape materials, almost half of the total project emissions can be in transportation.

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Developing a whole project life cycle assessment

Data was translated to a whole project LCA methodology, accounting for phase A embodied, phase B replacement, and phase D circular economy.

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The natural carbon cycle

In contrast to the linear character of construction emissions, the natural carbon cycle is a circular system of sequestration and respiration.

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An ecosystem approach to understanding sequestration

There is a huge range in carbon sequestration and carbon carrying capacity between different ecosystems, as well as different growth models.

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Accounting for biogenic carbon

Breaking out carbon stored in sustainably sourced biogenic materials is accounted for negative emissions per Whole Building LCA methodologies.

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Creating the architectural datasets

Using aggregated whole building LCA inventories from Carbon Leadership Forum with modifiers for structural and façade typologies using DeQo and Tally.

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Bringing datasets together

Combing architecture, landscape, and infrastructure to report on embodied, stored, and sequestration potential.

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Creating an open-source tool

Creating a drawing-based free web application for using the datasets to understand climate impacts from early design phases.

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Enabling iteration and specificity

The new version of Carbon Conscience enables layering land uses and the ability to edit material and transportation assumptions.

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Simplified reporting

Now designers can understand the climate impacts of proposals early in the design process, testing ideas, sketches, frameworks, and concepts.

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Developing a common workflow

Integrating Carbon Conscience into the next generation of Pathfinder will enable common fidelity of data and a clear future decarbonization workflow.

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“

This research project is an opportunity to be an example of a new perspective on how we conceive landscape design and the benefits in the mid- and long- term, not only for the environment, but for society and well-being. The proposal of the campus as a laboratory also gives value to the project, as universities are knowledge generators and what better place to experiment than on the campus with professors, students, and researchers participating.

”

- 2024 Awards Jury

Project Credits

Michael Grove, FASLA, Sponsoring Principal

Chris Hardy, Lead Researcher

Michael Frechette, Research Team

Danielle DeCarlo, Research Team

Shuai Hao, Research Team

Alison Nash, Research Team

Ekaterina Trosman, Research Team

Tamar Warburg, Research Team

Chris Winkler, Research Team

Sydney Bittinger, Research Team

Ken Goulding (PIC), Product Team

Armin Akhavan, Product Team

Timothy Gale, Product Team

Patrick Murray, Product Team

Thiyagarajan Adi Raman, Product Team

Eric Youngberg, Product Team

Kelly Farrell, Editor

Anna Scherling, Editor

Project Statement

Carbon Conscience results from a multi-year investigation into how designers can make informed planning decisions related to climate impacts. This work included a literature review of over 400 sources, including architectural, industrial, ecological, and landscape white papers. Carbon Conscience is the only peer-reviewed dataset and application that brings landscape and architectural land uses together to study planning decisions from a whole project life cycle assessment perspective. It is now being integrated into the next generation of Pathfinder, Landkit, and EPIC tools. Carbon Conscience supports advocacy for investing in living systems for carbon drawdown and reducing embodied carbon in the built environment.

Project Narrative

Carbon Conscience brings together landscape, architectural, and ecological literature into a common platform to make the potential global warming impacts of the built environment easy to understand and address in the early design phases—when design project teams can change course, adjust frameworks, and most effectively advocate for low-carbon design. The research started with a literature review to understand global warming impacts of land use decisions—since land use is the most fundamental decision-making unit for planning and urban design work. Early in the study, the landscape architect researcher learned that there were no clear baseline datasets for landscape materials. The investigation expanded to include over 170 unique materials and product typologies specified in landscape design projects. The team aggregated life cycle assessments (LCAs) and used box-plot statistics to report carbon factor ranges per typology. The research team then developed an inventory of land use assembly assumptions based on representative projects, resulting in over 220 unique landscape (and 200 architectural) land uses. Applying these assumptions based on unit area coverage, the researcher was able to estimate the mass of the various materials required to build that land use and then multiplied those quantities by their carbon factors and transportation costs to provide projected low-, mean-, and high-embodied carbon per land use. The team used a whole ecosystem approach to understand carbon sequestration capacity, studying the average carbon sequestration rates and storage capacity for macro ecosystems which could be translated to land use projections. The wide range of consulted white papers inevitably used different methods. To harmonize these citations into a common format, the team developed a matrix that correlated the projected biomass, average annual sequestration rates, decomposition rates, and allochthonous carbon assumptions. This step uncovered a huge range of sequestration potential—from low-carbon dry chaparral to extremely high-carbon mangroves. The team discovered the need to differentiate its models to include logistic curves for forests and linear regressions for wetlands—and the need to account for variable decomposition rates based on climatic assumptions and capacity for accumulation of soil organic carbon over time. The team was now able to compare land uses, such as estimating how many acres of restored temperate forest could offset a new building, or understanding the sequestration potential of a mangrove swamp at risk of demolition. A unique innovation was representing the living systems of the constructed environment in the same manner and rigor as buildings and infrastructure. The immediate products of this work included a white paper and dataset with a full, replicable methodology. This database is translated into the free and open-source Carbon Conscience platform for any designer, agency, or activist to test their ideas. The dataset is being integrated into the source data for the next version of the Pathfinder, EPIC, and Landkit, and is referenced in North Carolina State University Professor Meg Caulkins's upcoming book on low-carbon construction materials and design. This research revealed many questions and gaps in the literature, but it significantly boosts how landscape architects can tackle the challenge of decarbonizing the built environment through a collective effort—one design at a time.