I've been reflecting recently on how rapidly our world is changing. Obvious examples are the accelerating pace of the climate crisis, increasing frequency of extreme weather events, melting ice, rising seas, population displacement, and so on. Within the building industry, it's equally clear that radical reduction of embodied carbon has become a central focus of our conferences and webinars and even of our intentions and plans. Some would say that this new, more holistic focus on carbon is a sign of hope in the face of climate despair.

But I don't think so. Because the close partner of hope is depair (or fear), and one can so easily turn into the other. It is so easy to believe that hope is our essential motivation for working to make the world a better place. And when we see signs of disaster unfolding around us, it is just as easy to imagine that our failure is also possible or even inevitable. 

The alternative to both hope and fear is love: our deep connection with the natural world and our friends, families, communities—our loving relationship with all that is true and vital, vibrant and meaningful. We do this work because we are warriors, activated by courage and love. Margaret Wheatley, author of the the classic Leadership and the New Science, in a recent video held up a glass containing water. We are taught to think of this as a metaphor, she said. If we see the glass as half full, we are called optimists, and if half full we are called pessimists. Optimists have hope, we imagine, and hope enables action. 

Wheatley suggests an alternative. A warrior, she says, looks at the glass annd says, "Oh look, there's water! I wonder who needs it, and how I can get it to them?" At our core, we strive to calculate the embodied carbon of buildings and infrastructure, to develop benchmarks and targets for carbon reduction, to devise policies and design buildings in harmony with our planet's health, to share lessons we've learned and resources we've developed because we are warriors and we are driven by love.

Warm regards,

Andrew

A Changed Landscape for Embodied Carbon Action

In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, the Carbon Leadership Forum experienced rapid growth, confronted expanded opportunities for impact, and faced new challenges. Increasingly, the topic of embodied carbon has moved to the center of the conversation for the green building movement, and companies, organizations, policy-makers, and design professionals are confronting the carbon challenge with a new degree of urgency and focused attention. Read what CLF has been doing to accelerate system-wide change.

The Carbon Leadership Forum Seeks Applicants for Several New Staff Positions

The Carbon Leadership Forum seeks applicants for several new staff positions

The Carbon Leadership Forum is hiring for several new positions that will support our mission to reduce embodied carbon reductions in the built environment, including for a new research initiative from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, for which CLF will investigate the science and methods of carbon drawdown and storage, and develop a robust LCA framework and ecosystem of tools that can support the flow of data on novel materials into robust, comparative Whole Building Life Cycle Analysis (WBLCA) tools.

• Operations Manager
• Postdoctoral Scholar: Computational Methods for LCA Tools Development
• Buildings and Material Researcher (Research Engineer 2)
• Buildings and Material Researcher (Research Engineer 3)
• Buildings and Material Researcher (Research Engineer 4) 
• Research Coordinator 
• Postdoctoral Scholar: LCA Data analyst

Take a look at the details for all of our open and upcoming titles on our careers page.

Program Prepares Undergraduates to Become Embodied Carbon Leaders

The Carbon Leadership Forum has recently launched an internship program designed to introduce students early in their educational careers to the fundamentals of life cycle assessment and to promote understanding of how addressing embodied carbon is essential to solving the carbon challenge. The three interns selected for the first year of the program are Delilah Canales, Clare (Vivi) Kondrat, and Prajin (Zing) Uttamchandani.

Editor's Note: Prajin is a student at the University of Washington currently seeking a degree in Architecture, with a focus on sustainability. Past research and environmental restoration projects encourage an ongoing commitment to climate justice through continued academic experiences and work with the CLF. Prajin’s beliefs are centered around taking racial and economic disparities into account when working towards carbon reduction and broader climate action.

by Prajin Uttamchandani

Growing up in the age of digital communication has shaped the way I and others view the world around us. The threat of the climate crisis has loomed over our heads at every waking moment. Even as a child, I recognized that the world around me was at risk of collapse: with record breaking heat, cold, and rains, every day brought a new headline signaling impending disaster. The adults around me encouraged my learning about this, reminding me that I had the power to fix the mistakes that their generation had helped create.

I remember being aware of the power of nature all my life: even in third grade I wrote a book, as well as a third grader can, about Yellowstone National Park. I knew that the world was powerful. In fourth grade, I wrote about electric cars, learning as much as I could about them. I knew that human behaviors were damaging the world. As the years went on, I continued to learn about the climate crisis. Our natural environment is critical to our survival, and human behavior was on track to pillage it until nothing remained. I decided to do something about it.

Sharing a Vision of Robust Technical Guidance and Collective Action

by Frances Yang, Structures and Sustainability Specialist at Arup

Prior to the formation of the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) in 2009, there were few well established networks for Arup to share knowledge and insights on embodied carbon across the AEC industry. Since then, Arup has found in CLF a partner of mutual support and enrichment, sharing a vision of robust technical guidance and collective action to decarbonize our built environment. Arup has provided expert review for an expansive suite of CLF-led work needed to propel our mission forward, including the LCA Practice Guide, US Concrete PCR version 1.0, the 2017 Benchmarking Study, and Material Baselines Methodology Beta. Simultaneously, CLF has played a key advisory role for many Arup efforts to tackle embodied carbon at scale.