A group of built environment industry groups and movement leaders is proud to share a new collaborative initiative — the Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization (ECHO) Project — to tackle the challenge to rapidly reduce embodied carbon in built environments by ensuring that all embodied carbon reporting at the whole building and whole project scale (including landscapes and infrastructure) in the US follow the same clear definitions and scopes of included impacts.
ECHO is a coalition convened jointly by five leading non-profit organizations: Architecture2030, Building Transparency, the Carbon Leadership Forum, the International Living Future Institute, and the US Green Building Council. It is comprised of representatives from the American Institute of Architects, the Contractors Commitment, the Climate Positive Design Challenge, American Society of Landscape Architects, the MEP 2040 Commitment, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) (Infrastructure 2050 and SEI SE 2050 Commitment), Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI), and the Urban Land Institute (ULI).
On September 26, 2023, the ECHO coalition announced a key milestone in their alignment work on embodied carbon reporting. The group agreed to a first draft entitled, The North American Minimum Project Embodied Carbon Reporting Framework V1.0. The document outlined these draft requirements and is now being shared with partners. We expect to publish public-facing resources in early 2024. The ECHO project is also completing a data reporting schema to ensure that all organizations (standards-setting organizations, professional commitment organizations and others) use the same data schema for databases and digital tools to gather and share whole building/project embodied carbon data in the same way.
CLF will lead the coordination and facilitation of the ECHO Project as it enters its second phase going forward into 2024, taking on the role after a successful launch led by Architecture 2030. The ECHO Project intends to continue meeting to further define scopes and accounting practices for embodied carbon in the built environment, as well as to discuss future projects including the potential for joint participation in a central data repository of whole project embodied carbon data points for building and infrastructure projects, to assist in policy making and standards setting efforts.
