Below is the Executive Summary from an upcoming position paper titled Beyond the Carbon Divide - Aligning Objectives: Combining Operational and Embodied Carbon through Whole-Life Carbon Assessment.
Below is an excerpt from an upcoming paper co-authored by Alan Gibson, Owner of GO Logic; Katrin Klingenberg, Founder & Co-Executive Director of Phius; Chris Magwood, Manager of Carbon-Free Buildings at RMI; Jacob Racusin, Co-Founder & Director of Sustainability and Building Science at New Frameworks; Lisa White, Co-Executive Director of Phius; and Graham Wright, Chief Building Scientist at Phius. Jacob and Chris will present on this topic (and more) during PhiusCon 2026 on Saturday, Oct. 10.
Good building design provides people with shelter, safety, comfort, health, durability, affordability, and long-term value. In various combinations of priority, these objectives will continue to define building excellence. But none can be reliably sustained in the absence of a stable climate. Increasing climate disruption threatens building durability, occupant safety, infrastructure, insurance systems, supply chains, and affordability itself. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions produced by buildings is therefore a prerequisite for achieving every other objective of good building design.
More than 150 years ago, Henry David Thoreau posed a question that has only grown more relevant: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" Today, that observation has become an increasingly practical challenge for the building sector. Buildings cannot truly be considered healthy, resilient, durable, or affordable if the cumulative emissions associated with constructing and operating them contribute to destabilizing the climate on which those qualities ultimately depend.
Buildings are central to both the climate challenge and the climate solution.
Across their full life cycle, buildings generate greenhouse gas emissions through two primary pathways: the emissions associated with energy required to operate them (operational carbon), and the emissions associated with building material production, their supply chains, construction techniques, maintenance, replacement, and end-of-life processes (embodied carbon). The sum of these pathways, operational and embodied emissions, over the lifetime of a building, is referred to hereon out as “whole-life carbon”.
Over the past two decades, major progress has been made in reducing operational carbon emissions through high-performance building design, electrification of building systems, and renewable energy systems. More recently, growing attention has turned toward assessment of embodied carbon.
Both developments are necessary, but they have evolved in parallel rather than together.
In some corners of the industry, operational and embodied carbon have even come to be treated as competing priorities—as though improving one inevitably requires compromising the other. This false tradeoff has led to fragmented standards, policies, software tools, and professional practice.
The earth’s atmosphere does not recognize this distinction.
Whole-life carbon, is therefore the proper basis for measurement of a building's climate impact.
The next phase of building decarbonization must move beyond optimizing for reducing operational or embodied emissions individually and focus on whole-life carbon, with this metric becoming as routine a design parameter as energy, cost, durability and occupant health.
Fortunately, the industry is not starting from zero. Mature frameworks focused on assessing operational carbon already exist, while methodologies focused on assessing embodied carbon are rapidly advancing. The challenge is no longer invention, but alignment.
That alignment must occur across disciplines, standards organizations, software tools, certification systems, public policy, manufacturing, and project delivery processes. It must also acknowledge that buildings are not optimized for carbon alone. Cost, resilience, durability, health, constructability, grid impacts, and long-term adaptability all matter. The challenge is to optimize these objectives together, rather than treating carbon emissions as an isolated design problem.
This paper is an invitation to join this transition toward industry alignment.
We envision a building sector that:
Importantly, this transition does not require abandoning existing progress. The tools, standards, and expertise developed across the operational and embodied carbon communities are valuable foundations for the next stage of work. The opportunity now is to connect them.
The decisions made this decade will shape building-sector emissions for generations. The urgency of climate action therefore requires not only continued progress within individual domains, but greater coherence between them.
This paper reflects a shared commitment by organizations that have historically focused on different aspects of building decarbonization. Together, we believe the next phase of climate leadership requires integrating operational and embodied carbon into a common framework for decision-making.