As our planet warms and climate hazards intensify, our aging infrastructure faces unprecedented challenges. Society relies on infrastructure to connect people, drive economic growth, and enhance our quality of life. To improve these lifelines, we must invest in a holistic approach that balances resilient systems with low-impact materials; to successfully implement, collaboration must occur across many stakeholders, such as policymakers, industry professionals, educators, and innovators. The choices we make today will shape the world we leave for future generations; it’s time to rethink how we design and construct our communities.

The Impact of Construction Materials

The built environment is a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions; materials like cement, iron, steel, and aluminum account for approximately 15% of global emissions due to their incredibly energy-intensive manufacturing processes. Policies that support innovative approaches to reduce the energy demand of industrial processes and use alternative clean energy sources must be prioritized to reduce this impact. Additionally, Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) can provide transparent information about a product’s environmental impact. By requiring EPDs and performing emissions calculations on projects, owners and designers can make informed decisions, drive market demand for low-impact alternatives, and build industry awareness today.

Strategies Across the Entire Life Cycle

Reducing the carbon footprint of infrastructure requires a multifaceted approach. While “carbon” is used to simplify the term greenhouse gas emissions, embodied carbon refers to the total carbon emissions associated with a material, from its extraction through its end-of-life. By collaborating with a variety of stakeholders throughout the entire life cycle of a project, from planning and design through maintenance and demolition, we can identify opportunities to reduce the holistic carbon footprint: 

• Current Low-Carbon Opportunities: Continue to adopt low-carbon technologies and circular economy principles to maximize resource efficiency. Drive change by setting effective targets to reduce the carbon footprint of high-emitting materials. Assess the structural feasibility of current low-impact options like supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) and steel produced with electric-arc furnaces, along with recycled and warm mix asphalt. By testing and verifying existing materials and systems, we can identify opportunities for reuse and repurposing. 
• Opportunities for Infrastructure Innovation: Prioritize research into specialized construction, such as jet grouting for deep foundations. Careful consideration of temporary works, such as support systems and excavation methods, can significantly reduce a project’s material and energy consumption. Optimizing construction processes, minimizing detours, reusing existing structures when feasible, and implementing long-term maintenance strategies can further reduce a project’s impacts. 
• Aligning Policies, Investments, and Education: Ensure that communities have policies with defined emissions reduction targets, along with clear pathways to measure progress. Incentivize research and development to promote the adoption of low-carbon technologies and practices at scale. Additionally, a clean energy transition requires investments in our workforce, providing retraining and job placement programs to ensure a smooth transition.

Preparing for our Future

The climate projections that informed our design and engineering codes and standards are now outdated, requiring urgent updates to account for the increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Mitigating climate change and its associated costs requires a dual approach: investing in both low-impact materials and durable systems. By reducing carbon emissions, we can protect our communities from intensifying weather events, such as hurricanes that are strengthened by warming ocean temperatures.

Achieving a balanced future requires a systemic approach, akin to conducting an embodied carbon assessment across an asset’s entire life cycle. By collaborating across stakeholders and investing in clean energy and practices, workforce training, green education, and circular economy principles, we can build more prepared infrastructure systems for generations ahead.