The report highlights the substantial life cycle emissions of infrastructure projects; refrigerants; and the renovation of existing building stocks - specifically of mechanical, electrical, plumbing, IT, interiors and furnishings systems. Armed with this knowledge, we hope to spur action:

• Policymakers can use this to help make a case for embodied carbon programs and incentives.
• Practitioners and certification bodies can use this as supporting evidence to keep broadening the scope of our ambitions to reduce embodied carbon. 
• Eigentümer can use this to support life cycle carbon and challenge your project teams to decarbonize construction, operations, and refrigerants
• Funders can consider this evidence to include embodied carbon as part of a well-rounded climate strategy for the built environment.

Check out the full report and let us know how this methodology can help embodied carbon modeling in your state!

While these are important contributors, they are still only a percentage of embodied carbon. As we approach global climate targets in 2030 and 2050, it is increasingly important to have data on where the largest, most urgent opportunities are for reducing emissions, including embodied emissions. 

In this report, we estimate the embodied and operational carbon of buildings and infrastructure in Washington State during the period between 2025 and 2050. Our findings highlight the comparable significance of embodied carbon’s share of the estimated impacts to operational carbon’s share over the upcoming 25-year period.

Improving access to high-quality, transparent LCA data is essential for accurately measuring—and ultimately reducing—climate impacts across the built environment. This dashboard helps designers, policymakers, and researchers:

• Visualize building- and material-level environmental impacts.
• Explore how structural systems, materials, and design choices affect embodied carbon.
• Support data-informed design workflows and embodied carbon reduction policies.

Mel Chafart, Low Carbon Buildings Lead at CLF and creator of the Benchmark Explorer Dashboard, walks through the tool and how to get started in this short intro video. Let us know what you think—and share how you’re using the Benchmark Explorer!

In June, CLF released the 2025 CLF North American Material Baselines, which continues the work of and builds upon previous CLF Material Baselines reports. The CLF North American Material Baselines Report provides a snapshot of the state of environmental product declarations (EPDs) for North American-produced building materials. 

To drive action built on informed comparisons, the baselines serve as a basis of comparison for evaluating individual products in low-carbon procurement policies, green building rating systems, and project specifications. They also serve as average embodied carbon intensity values for project-scale modeling.

Key updates in this version include: 

• updated data and baseline values that reflect the current state of EPDs in 2025; 
• new categories like asphalt mixtures, applied fireproofing, brick, ceramic tile, and more; 
• more baseline values, reflecting new EPD data and CLF’s expansion of baseline-setting methods.   

Want to know more? Register for the upcoming CLF webinar on August 25 at 10am pst!

In our last July newsletter, we published the CLF Generic Reporting Template for Whole-Building LCA Results! 

We often get the question, “How should we report whole-building LCA results?”. This can be tough to answer because, without clear guidelines, building LCA modeling and reporting can be confusing,  time-consuming,  and span a wide range of needs and use cases. But the reporting itself can, and should be, clear and consistent. The CLF Generic Reporting Template for Whole-Building LCA Results condensed the latest standards and best practices into a simple yet flexible reporting framework to serve a wide range of purposes.

This is a generic LCA reporting template to support current and future LCA reporting programs and efforts. This template was developed as a flexible yet consistent framework to suit a wide range of LCA reporting needs. Though it is primarily aimed at mid to late-stage design phase reporting within a North American context, it can be easily customized to suit broader needs. Guidance for both LCA modelers and program administrators is provided throughout the document, including extensive definitions, user notes, and references. 

We hope it helps to create more consistency and alignment around whole-building LCA reporting and saves time for both LCA modelers and reporting program administrators alike. We plan to continually update and maintain this template over time to advance LCA modeling and reporting across the industry. 

Check it out and let us know how you’ve used this resource so far!

We’re kicking things off with two live webinars featuring project teams from CLF’s Embodied Carbon Reductions Built Project Case Study Collection. Each session will highlight a different set of projects and teams, who will share how they approached embodied carbon reductions and what they learned along the way.

Wednesday, August 6 at 9am pst/12pm est | Case study project team presenters: 

• Justis Residence - Arkin Tilt Architects
• Trent University Forensics Crime Scene Facility - Builders for Climate Action
• The Wendy - Sustainable Building Partners
• 1510 Webster - DCI Engineers
• Pepper Construction Cincinnati Office - Pepper Construction

Missed the first webinar? Check out the full recording on the CLF YouTube Channel

In this webinar, the authors will present an overview of the project and walk through the report’s methods and results, highlighting significant updates compared to previous versions. CLF staff will be available to respond to audience questions.

[You can watch the recording of the 2023 CLF Material Baselines webinar for additional background.]

Über das Carbon Leadership Forum

Wer wir sind

• The Carbon Leadership Forum accelerates transformation of the building sector to radically reduce the embodied carbon in building materials and construction.
• We pioneer research, create resources, foster cross-sector collaboration, and incubate member-led initiatives to bring embodied carbon emissions of buildings down to zero.
• We are architects, engineers, contractors, material suppliers, building owners, and policymakers who care about the future and take bold steps to eliminate embodied carbon from buildings and infrastructure.

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