Aurora Jensen is a Senior Manager focused on Low Carbon Buildings at the Carbon Leadership Forum. Her role emphasizes building-scale embodied carbon reduction through research, technical guidance and collaboration. Before joining CLF, Aurora grew and led the Embodied Carbon team at Brightworks Sustainability. She supported clients in understanding and driving down the embodied carbon impacts of their buildings and portfolios through design exploration and procurement. She has led numerous whole-building life cycle assessments (WBLCAs) for LEED and ILFI and published research on the embodied carbon of mass timber buildings. With previous experience in operational energy modeling and evaluating passive strategies, she works to link operational and embodied carbon considerations and consider trade-offs. Aurora also teaches Environmental Design as a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design at The New School.
By Aurora Jensen
My embodied carbon journey was kicked into motion early in my career when I lucked into working at KieranTimberlake, and got the chance to support their research group on embodied carbon education for Tally. In 2015 embodied carbon felt both essential and niche, and was still finding its foothold. I am still amazed at how quickly it has gained traction over the last decade as a prominent aspect of building decarbonization puzzle!  Â
From there I found my way to graduate school, where I became interested in new frameworks for thinking about energy, supply chains, materials and systems. For my master’s thesis I investigated the thermally massive behavior of mass timber, and studied its embodied and operational impacts at the rowhome scale. On the side, I worked a series of fascinating jobs – from archivally investigating the supply chain of the historic Seagram Building, to running the LCA for a USDA Wood Innovation Grant focused on mass timber solutions for multi-family housing. These experiences only stoked my interest in how embodied carbon opens the door to wider and more complicated stories to be told about supply chains, with carbon as a starting point.
Since graduate school I have worked in engineering and sustainability consulting, with a dash of high performance building energy modelling and a whole lot of project life cycle assessment. In the past few years, I grew the embodied carbon team at Brightworks Sustainability, and sharpened that team’s ability to serve market-leading clients who wanted to decarbonize their portfolios and push towards market transformation.Â
I am completely humbled to join this group of thinkers and catalysts at CLF. CLF has been an important throughline of my working life to date. I have leaned heavily on its body of work, carried Kate’s book, joined and later led the NY hub, and followed CLF’s forays into climate-smart wood, policy advocacy, and benchmarking. With this jump, I am eager to be part of the CLF forcing mechanism that combines efforts on policy, research and design education towards hard-to-abate sectors like industrial decarbonization and construction.Â
I am also inspired and excited to be a part of CLF’s climate-focused mission. In my day-to-day life, I find grappling with climate to be a challenge; trying to live thoughtfully while caring deeply about climate change can paralyze even the smallest decisions. While individual choices do matter, working on climate change helps me situate the smaller decisions of living, and lets me redirect my energy at the larger systemic challenges in front of us. At the same time, I draw hope from observing real progress on global trends like falling extreme poverty, passing peak pollution, China’s pace of electrification, or the nosediving cost of solar. These examples keep me believing that making world-bending change is possible, and that climate is worth working on even when things aren’t looking so good.
CLF has always supported the rising tide of embodied carbon practitioners who do the thoughtful work of finding real solutions, and I am eager to take a step back and think about what else practitioners need to succeed. Beyond this emphasis on practice, my role will focus on research and policy solutions at the building scale as a complement to the growing tide of material-focused policies that are emerging around the country.Â
What a joy to be able to contribute!
I draw hope from observing real progress on global trends like falling extreme poverty, passing peak pollution, China’s pace of electrification, or the nosediving cost of solar. These examples keep me believing that making world-bending change is possible, and that climate is worth working on even when things aren’t looking so good.
