This tool allows architects and designers to analyze and estimate the carbon equivalent of emissions associated with all aspects of the project. The Zero Carbon Tool gives an overall picture of how key decisions made at early stages of design can impact the project's total carbon use.

Developed by Brussels Environment, the Reversible Design Checklist is a voluntary design tool which aims to help building owners and designers in Brussels to create reversible and circular buildings.

The Checklist is available in:

Contractors are uniquely positioned to impact the sustainability of building projects. In preconstruction, contractors impact the design of a building by providing feedback to designers and clients. They influence product and material selection through the submittal process. Finally, contractors control how a project gets built, including the equipment that’s used, how construction waste is managed, and the extent of surrounding site and landscape disturbance.

Constructing new buildings and sites with the least possible environmental impact involves three important steps: reduce, renew and offset. Offsetting means calculating the project's carbon footprint so it can be balanced by funding resources or activities like renewable energy and land protection — resources that benefit and protect the planet.

OpenLCA is an open source and free software for Sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment, with the following features:

In North America, the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings is the only free software tool that is designed to evaluate whole buildings and assemblies based on internationally recognized life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology.

WoodWorks offer two calculators that can quantify the benefits of building with wood, which sequesters carbon, instead of materials with high embodied carbon such as steel and concrete.

• Carbon Estimator - to be used if you don't have full information on the volume of wood used in the building
• Carbon Calculator - for more accurate calculations where the wood products used and specific building type and size can be entered.

Tally is a life cycle assessment (LCA) tool that enables calculation of the environmental impacts of building material selections, directly in an Autodesk® Revit® model.

WUFI - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)/Fraunhofer IBP is a menu-driven PC program which allows realistic calculation of the transient coupled one-dimensional heat and moisture transport in multi-layer building components exposed to natural weather. It is based on the newest findings regarding vapor diffusion and liquid transport in building materials and has been validated by detailed comparison with measurements obtained in the laboratory and on outdoor testing fields.

NREL's PVWatts® Calculator Estimates the energy production of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) energy systems throughout the world. It allows homeowners, small building owners, installers and manufacturers to easily develop estimates of the performance of potential PV installations.