As owners and investors face mounting pressure to make new projects compliant with modern environmental standards, the concept of “whole-life” carbon has become a focus of increased interest. The model approximates the total emissions of a structure, both during construction and over its lifespan. A panel at the 2024 Asia Pacific Summit in Tokyo took a hard look at the implications of this approach.
According to Giovanni Cossu, head of sustainability at CapitaLand Development, the first step is to understand what types of carbon emissions can actually be controlled. For example, emissions for developers originate almost entirely from construction, so the goal there is to decarbonize the design and construction as much as possible on the front end.
The next step is to define relevant emissions baselines for the operational systems once a project is completed. This can be challenging, Cossu conceded, because “our portfolio spans different countries and asset classes. Singapore, for example, is a mature and regulated market, so baselines are based on regulator information such as emission factors. But in countries like China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, the pace of adoption and the clarity of those [emissions] requirements is much lower, which means that many whole-life carbon assessments are based on assumptions.”
In this regard, Asia Pacific remains behind the curve relative to North America and Europe, where the regulatory backdrop of market practices is more evolved, with comprehensive carbon calculators and company-specific product data leading to more precise operational baselines. Still, momentum for change across the Asia Pacific region is real, with industry and government associations in some jurisdictions moving to introduce a variety of new standards.
According to Eddie Tse, Hong Kong-based group sustainability manager of Gammon Construction, cutting whole-life carbon emissions should begin early in the project: “I always emphasize getting your design right, and to do it at the beginning, because you can then design out waste, design out carbon, use less material, make construction lean through lean design—and it also lowers costs, so it works all around.”
After that, the focus turns to choosing low-carbon construction materials. Sourcing steel and cement from low-carbon suppliers is by far the most effective way of addressing a building’s embodied carbon, given that it usually accounts for the lion’s share of construction emissions.
But relatively little of the cement and steel manufacturing among regional producers operates on a low-carbon emissions basis, particularly in China and India.
According to Pritya Pravina Widiarta, Asia Pacific director of climate change at HSBC: “On the one hand, we see their fleets [of factories] are still dependent on coal and are still young. But at the same time, they have the scale that would enable them to transition [to low-carbon], and because China, India, and Vietnam are now exporting a lot of their steel to markets in the EU, where the cross-border adjustment mechanism will set carbon emission levels low, they need to look at decarbonizing their production to remain competitive. So our focus now is to unlock investment opportunities and help them scale innovation so they can future-proof their businesses.”
Beyond that, however, is the need for greater collaboration between the producers of low-carbon materials and the end users who will ultimately create a market for those products. At the moment, it’s a chicken-and-egg situation because suppliers generally have little sense of market demand, while developers and contractors—who may have little understanding of low-carbon pricing dynamics—will often say they can’t use those materials because they’re not available.
As CapitaLand’s Cossu explained, the process of accounting for a building’s carbon footprint over its lifetime boils down to three basics: “First, identify an assessment of scope one, two, and three [emissions]; then verify the three or five key emission areas; and finally drive those emissions down in terms of demand and collaboration with the supply chain.”
