A new Whole Life Carbon Accounting service from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) was unveiled last month in an effort to help building owners and developers make accurate decisions about building performance at all stages of the design phase while pushing the industry further toward a much-needed reduced carbon future. 

The service was created by the firm’s sustainability team and targets the important early-stage embodied carbon emissions of a building, offering a consolidation of disparate carbon assessments that can lead to drastic miscalculations of emissions on projects in between their initial design and completed construction. 

“[The] gaps between traditional assessments and a building’s true performance can lead to a performance gap of up to five times more energy use and/or carbon emissions between predicted and actual values. Our service puts an end to this,” SOM’s Sustainability Director, Mina Hasman, explained via a press announcement.

SOM says the service was used successfully on their award-winning 2019 design for the Billie Jean King Main Library in Long Beach, California. It adds to a repertoire of new carbon assessment products that have recently been developed throughout the industry. It likewise helps to expand on the firm’s previous efforts, including a vision for carbon-absorbing cities, at a unique time in architectural history when the high technology that goes into the design of buildings is being constantly outpaced by new and better means of analyzing their environmental outputs with potentially tremendous cost to those who own and operate them.

“The greatest opportunity to work towards a more sustainable future is to invest in new climate action measures,” Design Partner Kent Jackson says finally. “We are proud to extend our long and proven history of working with public bodies, property owners and developers to help lead the way for a low-carbon built environment. We look forward to bringing our skills and expertise to bear on the critical issue of a reduced carbon future.”

Information about accessing the Whole Life Carbon Accounting service can be found here.