Embodied carbon assessment
Antony Oliver
13 March 2025
I chose a quiet corner of the Royal Festival Hall to talk about embodied carbon with Adrian Campbell, founder of the Change Building consultancy and my go-to expert when it comes to reducing carbon across the infrastructure lifecycle.
At least it was quiet when we started to record this week’s episode of The Infrastructure Podcast! Apparently, weekday concerts are popular with schoolkids! Who’d have thought!
No worries, any corner of this fabulous, brutalist concrete masterpiece on the South Bank is a great place to chat to Adrian about the need to understand, to think hard and to take action to reduce the embodied carbon in our modern infrastructure.
It’s big and important stuff. Have a listen
here and on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and all your favourite podcast hosts.
As Adrian points out, the reality is that building fabric performance, building management systems and energy sources have all become much less carbon intensive over time as we have understood and assessed the carbon challenge. But less so for embodied carbon, meaning that is now the dominant source of emissions over the infrastructure life-cycle and to the obvious focus for designers’ attention.
That starts with getting the next generation of engineers both fired up and informed. Hence Adrian’s new guide to assessing embodied carbon which he has just rolled out to his students at the
University of Southampton. And a very useful and helpful little guide it has proved to be.
Which got me thinking. Why shouldn’t every student have a look at it – every infrastructure professional for that matter? Well, to be honest, Adrian hasn’t actually published it formally yet. (But why not have a chat with him if you can help?)
But he does explain it well in the podcast. So have a listen.
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