Giving Compass' Take:

• As the call for climate action grows stronger, the construction industry is encouraged to pay closer attention to carbon emissions during building operations processes.

• What are some ways that donors can support or facilitate partnerships between environmentalists and the construction industry?

• Learn why wildfire recovery should incorporate natural building strategies.

The building you call home, or the one you call your office — the building you are sitting in at this very moment —has a huge impact on the environment. From heating and cooling, to lighting, insulation and more, every small home, medium warehouse and large high-rise office building is responsible for emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Referred to as operational carbon — or the carbon emissions associated with building operations — this well-known output has seen years of innovation across the built environment to mitigate some of its dire environmental impacts.

However, one other significant piece of the sustainable building puzzle, embodied carbon, is sorely overlooked. Embodied carbon is operational carbon’s often-overlooked counterpart; it is the footprint that results from the building and construction of a project, including the extraction, fabrication, transportation and erection of construction materials.

In fact, even in the environmental community, few know that the emissions from manufacturing building materials actually contribute more than 11 percent of global emissions (good luck wrapping your head around a record 37.1 gigatons of global CO2 emissions in 2018). Unfortunately, all embodied carbon processes are invisible to the future tenant and their true cost is not part of the development equation.

As natural disasters become more destructive and "climate strikes" take hold around the globe, we no longer collectively can turn a blind eye to the climate crisis we’re racing towards. It’s time for governments, businesses and citizens (and especially the real estate and construction industry) to answer the calls of climate action that are being shouted from all corners of the world.

That’s why today, it’s increasingly important for corporations, investors and innovators to work together to create new solutions that can address embodied carbon and its inherent hidden challenges at scale.

Read the full article about thoughtful construction due to climate change by Micah Kotch at GreenBiz.