Embodied carbon of tall buildings: specific challenges

Tall buildings are becoming the predominant building typology in cities and megacities worldwide, with only a few regional exceptions. These buildings have unique construction and fire and life safety characteristics, which increase their initial embodied carbon footprints over other building typologies for the same built areas. However, when considering the longevity that also often goes with the more robust construction of tall buildings, as well as the overall site density that they bring to an urban core, where residents can live close enough to walk to work and the population density allows for mass transit to be affordable and functional, the total carbon footprint of the population with time tells a different story.

This chapter explores these issues and helps identify the largest areas of embodied carbon that go into tall buildings. It also looks at opportunities for their optimization and some of the life cycle topics currently being debated within the tall building community. Much of the focus is on the “shell and core” of the tall building and those decisions the initial building design team will often face as they may look to optimize the embodied carbon footprint of the project.