Evaluating building design options with a focus on simultaneously minimising life cycle greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and life cycle cost (LCC) is difficult due to a lack of comprehensive and accessible tools. An integrated approach where life cycle GHG and LCC performance can be balanced is essential in order to optimise a building's overall life cycle performance.

A building is responsible for the emission of a significant amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the various stages of its life cycle.

As global population and urbanization increase, so do the direct and indirect environmental impacts of construction around the world. Low-impact products, buildings, precincts and cities are needed to mitigate the effects of building construction and use. Analysis of embodied energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across these scales is becoming more important to support this direction.

This project interim report presents the initial outcomes of the research that consist of:
PART 1: Recruitment of participants from single dwellings and multi-unit dwellings, and initial data analysis of the stage 1 survey;
PART 2: Analysis of the BASIX assessment model, key variables and methods of data collection for the stage 2 energy performance monitoring.

While relocatable, prefabricated learning environments have formed an important component of school infrastructure in Australia, prefabrication for permanent school buildings is a new and emerging field. This review of prefabrication for schools is timely. In 2017, Australia’s two largest state education departments committed to prefabrication programs for permanent school infrastructure. In this paper we examine the recent history of prefabrication for Australian school buildings in the context of prefabrication internationally.

New research shows that 90 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions are emitted annually in constructing new buildings and infrastructure and maintaining the existing ones. Reducing this liability of “embodied” emissions will be much harder than building zero-carbon buildings. Here is why.

Energy efficient houses are often thought to be a promising way to reduce our environmental footprint by using less energy and producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, surprisingly, if you consider the whole life cycle of a house, it turns out that sometimes a new home designed to save energy can end up using more than an average house.
Read the full article on The Conversation.

This report provides a means to determine where Integrated Carbon Metrics goals should be directed, so as to ensure research and tools are developed to best suit industry requirements. This report provides a summary of a scoping study’s findings and a brief discussion of workshop outcomes. 

The building sector is responsible for a significant proportion of a nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. In an attempt to mitigate these emissions, industry and government have been mainly focussed on reducing operational emissions associated with buildings, leaving the embodied emissions largely ignored. As operational emissions continue to decrease, embodied emissions will start to play a larger role in the life cycle emissions of the built environment.

Cities can be seen as complex urban systems that mobilise local and global resource flows to meet the needs of their inhabitants and their manufacturing sector. However, the local consumption of resources can be responsible for major local and global environmental changes that impact the human health and wellbeing inside and outside of the boundary of the urban system. With global urban population expected to continue to grow, the mitigation of further future environmental pressures from urban consumption is of critical importance.