ECHO is Changing Embodied Carbon Reporting For the Better
Representatives from across the industry gathered regularly starting in March 2023 to form a strategic partnership to pursue greater alignment regarding the collection and reporting of embodied carbon data by certification programs and initiatives across the industry
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According to the latest figures from Architecture 2030, the embodied carbon from building structure, substructure, and enclosures are responsible for about 11 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 28 percent of global building sector emissions. Reducing these emissions is critical to addressing climate change and meeting Paris Climate Agreement targets.
However, terminology, methodologies, assessment tools, and data collection for evaluating embodied carbon are fragmented, inconsistent, and often conveyed in proprietary formats. (We cannot even get our units figured out.) This creates major barriers for market utilization and eventual codification of optimization targets, including:
- Lack of interoperability: different software platforms, environmental product declaration (EPD) publishers, and databases all use their own formats.
- Data silos: manufacturers and designers cannot easily reuse or integrate data.
- Slow decision-making: without harmonization, it is difficult to compare materials or optimize projects for embodied carbon reductions.
In an effort to confront these barriers head-on, representatives from across the building design and construction industry, including green building rating systems, industry membership organizations, embodied carbon subject matter expert organizations, and industry commitment leaders gathered regularly starting in March 2023 to form a strategic partnership to pursue greater alignment regarding the collection and reporting of embodied carbon data by certification programs and initiatives across the industry. The result: ECHO.
ECHO Project
ECHO (Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization) is a coalition convened jointly by five leading non-profit organizations:
- Architecture 2030
- Building Transparency
- Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF)
- International Living Future Institute (ILFI)
- U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC)
The coalition is also comprised of representatives from:
- American Institute of Architects (AIA) (2030 Commitment)
- Canada Green Building Council (CAGBC)
- Contractors Commitment
- Climate Positive Design Challenge
- American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)
- MEP 2040 Commitment
- American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) (Infrastructure 2050 and the SEI SE 2050 Commitment)
- Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI)
- Urban Land Institute (ULI)
Architecture 2030 led in the initial launch of ECHO; and today CFL coordinates and facilitates the ECHO Project – an ongoing initiative by which the coalition seeks to better define scopes and accounting practices for embodied carbon in the built environment.
To date, two signature milestones have been released to the public: the Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements: ECHO Recommendations for Alignment and the ECHO Reporting Schema.
ECHO Recommendations for Alignment
First released to the public in September 2024, the coalition's Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements: ECHO Recommendations for Alignment summarizes their findings and recommendations around project life cycle assessment (LCA) requirements to drive alignment in the modeling and reporting of project LCAs submitted to the commitment and certification programs included in ECHO.
The publication's recommendations leverage a review of twenty-nine commitments, certification programs, standards, policies, and benchmarking initiatives relevant to North American project LCA requirements, which are also summarized in the document.
Considering that ECHO's participating organizations represent the full scope of the built environment – from buildings to parks to roads and beyond – the group's publications focus on building project-related LCA, which encompasses whole building LCAs (WBLCA or wbLCA), sitework LCAs (constituting both hardscape and softscape), and infrastructure LCAs (constituting roadways, bridges, and other infrastructure projects).
The latest version of the published recommendations can be found on ECHO's publication homepage: echo-project.info/publications
ECHO Reporting Schema
Also first released in September 2024 was the first draft of the ECHO Reporting Schema – a formal definition of embodied carbon-related data elements (i.e., entities and their attributes) to streamline reporting, reduce inconsistencies, and support seamless data exchange across various LCA tools, platforms, and databases. The ECHO Reporting Schema aligns LCA reporting fields across North American geographies and platforms, filling gaps where no alignment previously existed.
The ECHO Reporting Schema is formally referred to as the ECHO Schema Field and Descriptions and is publicly accessible as a Microsoft Excel file. It is accompanied by an explanatory white paper titled An Introduction to the ECHO Reporting Schema.
The ECHO Reporting Schema will continue to be refined and expanded. The latest version of it can be found on ECHO's publication homepage: echo-project.info/publications
What is Next?
Wide-scale utilization of the ECHO Reporting Schema across the building design and construction industry offers the potential for greater market uptake of embodied carbon optimization in the building design and construction industry by:
- Enabling automation: structured datasets can flow directly into/out of building information modeling (BIM), life cycle assessment (LCA) tools, and embodied carbon databases.
- Improving comparability: consistent definitions of scopes, stages, and data reduce the risk of “apples-to-oranges” comparisons.
- Scaling impact: validated and accessible embodied carbon data at scale opens pathways for policy, procurement, and design optimization targets.
Readers are advised to reference the ECHO Project homepage for future updates to the schema and other supportive information resources.
