Climate Change is the greatest threat to the natural environment and humanity. Atmospheric carbon has been rising annually to historical highs, leading to global increases in temperatures. The built environment sector has a crucial role to play in responding to the climate crisis and with a highly connected value chain, this presents an opportunity for the sector to address carbon holistically from a whole life perspective and to tackle both operational and embodied carbon in design, construction and operations.

The Singapore Green Building Council (SGBC) champions the decarbonisation of Singapore's built environment and has launched a series of programmes and activities to galvanise and support industry efforts. This includes the Singapore Built Environment Embodied Carbon Pledge as well as the Singapore Building Carbon Calculator, which was developed in collaboration with the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), JTC Corporation (JTC) and the Energy Studies Institute (ESI) at National University of Singapore (NUS).

The Embodied Carbon in Buildings Calculation Guide supports Singapore’s decarbonisation efforts by providing guidance on defining the scope and methodology for measuring and reporting the embodied carbon emissions of building and construction activities. It is particularly useful for understanding the upfront carbon of building and infrastructure projects, where upfront carbon is the emissions resulting from the materials production and construction phases of an asset’s lifecycle, before the building or infrastructure asset begins to be used. In contrast to other categories of emissions, these emissions have already been released into the atmosphere before the building is occupied or the infrastructure begins operation.

This free-to-use Guide is intended to serve as an informative resource to harmonise carbon emissions data collection efforts during the design and construction phases of projects, and to provide a standardised framework for the reporting of embodied carbon emissions. This will facilitate the aggregation of embodied carbon emissions information of Singapore’s buildings and construction activities, and allow for national averages and benchmarks to be determined.

Click here to view and download the Guide.

Click here to download an editable spreadsheet of the Carbon Guide Reporting Format.