Embodied Carbon Action Plan (ECAP) Basics
Your firm’s ECAP is central to your commitment to SE 2050 and to net zero embodied carbon structures. The ECAP articulates how you will educate your firm’s staff in embodied carbon, how you will report the embodied carbon of your projects, how you will document your embodied carbon reduction strategies and how you will advocate within the industry. We ask that firms put careful thought into the plan and consider what you can implement within your unique firm and how you can be most impactful. Firms are provided 4 months to develop their ECAP prior to uploading to your account. There are no right or wrong ECAPs, however, there are minimum expectations for each ECAP and we hope your plan captures opportunities unique to your practice. When prompted we hope you will elect to make your ECAP public thereby informing the profession of developing best practices around embodied carbon reduction.
Below are the (4) target areas to include in your plan.
- Education
- Reporting Plan
- Embodied carbon reduction strategies
- Advocacy
ECAP Requirements
Education
The first step to building engagement within your firm is through education. We all should strive to understand the impacts of our design decisions and the effects they have on our environment.
Address how you plan to:
- Share the SE 2050 Commitment with your office
- Educate employees on how to measure and report embodied carbon
- Educate employees on carbon reduction strategies
Create a Reporting Plan
We ask that provide the Program with structural material quantities and/or embodied carbon impacts for all of your projects. In the first year you are only required to provide 25% of your projects as we expect a data upload learning curve. Click here for a summary of what we require for each project at a minimum.
To successfully implement high quality data upload we recommend creating a reporting plan within the ECAP that identifies the following:
- Who will be in charge of managing the data upload? Will each project manager be responsible for their own projects?
- When will you upload your data? We recommend uploading within one week of submitting Construction Documents.
- How will you perform quality control over the data that has been uploaded?
Carbon Reduction Strategies
You are one of many firms that must employ strategies for embodied carbon reductions to scale successfully. But we recognize that each firm is different with different business models and workflows that will determine how a firm best employs firm wide strategies. We ask that you outline what your focus will be and how you will implement then. The following are a few questions to help get you started.
- Where does your firm stand with respect to the national benchmarks?
- Can you find ways on all your projects to reduce embodied carbon?
- How will you engage on projects and demonstrate your ability to reduce embodied carbon on the project?
- Does your project allow for salvaged materials?
- Are you employing performance-based strategies?
- Are you collaborating with other design team members for greatest impact?
Advocacy
True change can only come from industry-wide adoption. Consider planning opportunities to share your experience and knowledge within your firm, with your design community, and beyond. Host a webinar or lunch and learn, attend a conference, connect with the SEI Sustainability Committee, or reach out to manufacturers and policy-makers.
As part of your ECAP, how do you plan to:
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- Share knowledge and data to accelerate adoption of embodied carbon reduction?
- Encourage industry and policy change incentivizing availability of low-carbon and carbon sequestration materials?
**Upload your ECAP here.
