SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

Reducing carbon emissions in the building industry

Embodied carbon emissions generated as buildings are constructed will be the predominant source of greenhouse gas emissions from Australia’s commercial buildings by 2050. However, there’s no agreed standard for their measurement, and as we often say at Meld – you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

We partnered with the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) and thinkstep-anz to co-create a nationally accepted carbon emissions measurement tool to tackle this challenge with stakeholders from across the built environment.

Design Challenge

When we started the project, there was no single accepted approach to calculating embodied emissions from buildings in Australia or globally.
This was a big problem because as Australia’s electricity grid decarbonises, the proportion of embodied emissions from construction will drastically eclipse emissions from buildings as they operate, making embodied emissions our number one decarbonisation target in buildings.

As buildings are responsible for around 38% of global carbon emissions, reaching consensus across Australian stakeholders on a NABERS tool was crucial because this directly impacts our ability to meet Australia’s Paris-Agreement-aligned climate change goals.

But while reaching agreement on the tool was critical, experts thought this was impossible at the start of the project because so many stakeholders had differing opinions and opposing commercial interests.

Our approach

We started by deeply understanding stakeholder needs, aspirations and challenges through interviews and workshops. These helped us establish two things: firstly that there was a strong desire for a tool; and secondly that NABERS was the right organisation to develop it.

This research also fed into the development of tool objectives and a set of shared needs. These objectives and needs were then used to guide and evaluate discussions and decisions with stakeholders on how the tool might work.

Project objectives

  • Support behaviour change to urgently reduce embodied emissions
  • Focus primarily on measurement, verification, comparing and disclosure
  • Start by solving targeted problems now, rather than waiting to solve all problems in the future

Core needs shared by all stakeholders

  • Impactful: Help drive behaviour change that leads to a real reduction in embodied emissions.
  • Consistent: To produce reliable outputs, the tool should use a consistent approach including assumptions, system boundaries, calculation methodology and data sources.
  • Collaborative: Align with existing tools and systems to avoid market confusion and ensure widespread adoption.
  • Streamlined: To minimise effort and costs and to expand reach.
  • Trusted: Offer a robust, transparent process with third party-verified results to build market confidence and trust.
  • Meaningful: Ensure the outputs of the NABERS tool are easy to understand and create fair comparisons between buildings.

Achieving industry-wide buy-in

A distinguishing feature of this work is the bespoke design and execution of a strategy that engaged stakeholders with divergent views and interests. The following tactics helped us to achieve this.

1. We established our multidisciplinary team to bring different perspectives and expertise:

  • NABERS  was the solution owner, had knowledge of other aligned NABERS tools and brought strong industry trust/connection.
  • Meld Studios (hello!) brought research methods and facilitation skills to understand and engage stakeholders  and reach agreement, and;
  • thinkstep-anz  brought deep sustainability expertise to shape solutions we tested.

2. We leveraged strategic partnerships:

The project team collaborated closely with the Green Building Council of Australia. We also brought in two additional embodied emissions experts with divergent views to work alongside thinkstep-anz and critique the project team’s solutions.

3. We enabled people from over 200 organisations to shape our roadmap

We used snowball participant recruitment to attract over 150 organisations. In addition, once we designed our roadmap our proposals were opened out for public consultation (supported by webinars for newbies) ensuring even more people could contribute.

Participants were supported to contribute because we:

  • Initially separated competitors to enable them to speak freely.
  • Conducted sessions virtually to include people irrespective of geographical location.
  • Started with instructions for participants to make space for all voices and included thinking time for participants to contribute their thoughts in writing, enabling quieter participants to contribute.
  • Made complex ideas easy to digest using stripped-back language and ideas.
  • Made it easy to compare and evaluate proposed solutions against the needs everyone agreed on were fundamental.
  • Listened to them and incorporated their ideas, which encouraged them to keep sharing.
  • Engaged stakeholders group by group to:
    • Understand differences between cohorts (e.g. the needs of policymakers, versus those funding buildings versus building owners and developers)
    • Enable like-minded people to bounce around ideas, and
    • Enable participants to hear each others’ needs and concerns so they are more likely to agree on mutually beneficial solutions.

The solution

Our final deliverable was ten integrated ideas describing a future NABERS tool to measure, verify and compare embodied emissions in new buildings and major refurbishments.  This design informed the development of a minimum viable product (MVP) that is now being piloted, as well as a roadmap which includes ways to expand the scope of carbon emissions accounted for in the MVP.

Impacts

Strong industry buy-in

We achieved consensus on the design of a minimum viable tool and roadmap relating to a highly complex and technical design challenge involving multiple industry groups with competing needs and commercial interests.  The NABERS tool “solved” a problem that all experts (including us) thought was irreconcilable, which means we now have industry supporting us in areas that they started out opposing. This includes developers, building owners and tenants, sustainability consultants working in embodied carbon and those providing embodied carbon tools, architects, engineers, construction companies, manufacturers, policymakers, investors, standards bodies, academics, industry peak bodies and industry associations.

One of our stakeholders commented:

“I can’t believe we’ve got to something we agree on, especially without anyone punching each other.”

Direct outcomes

This work supports:

  • Buildings to target, compare and reduce emissions.
  • A shift toward better building design, reuse and low-emitting building materials.
  • Governments, investors, and tenants to set ambitious decarbonisation targets, policies, and regulations.

Indirect outcomes

This work also:

  • Enabled the development of the NABERS’ embodied carbon tool.
  • Influenced Infrastructure Australia and NSW approaches to embodied carbon.
  • Underpins national policy recommendations.
  • Supported NSW Planning Policy on Sustainable Buildings.
  • Contributed to the Green Building Council of Australia’s (GBCA)
  • Embodied Carbon guide.
  • Raised “embodied carbon literacy” with swathes of stakeholders, driving momentum for urgent change.

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