The RICS Building Carbon Database

In December the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors launched a new and publicly available dataset that lists the embodied carbon associated a building. The data set has been commissioned by WRAP and the UK Green Building Council.

The dataset provides an indication of the carbon footprint of a whole building based on type and can be used to calculate the emissions generated at each stage of the construction process. Free and publicly available, the detailed data set provides a tool that can be utilised by professionals from all disciplines to benchmark their building design and aims to identify opportunities for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. RICS believe that this will provide a vital tool as part of the Construction 2025 strategy implemented by the government, to reduce emissions associated with the built environment by 50% by 2025.

We will be interested to see how engagement with this tool will progress and hope that the development of a comparative and sophisticated set of bench marking data will have real impact on carbon emissions from the industry.