Building with Earth: How to Design Buildings Fitting Future Environmental Objectives?

International institutions are aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050, with a huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Several countries, including France, Switzerland and the UK, are implementing environmental regulations for the built environment and moving towards a Net-Zero strategy. This study presents a parametric model combining analyses of energy use, embodied carbon and structural analysis in Rhino3D/Grasshopper. Any set of materials can be considered while meeting regional design requirements. The model builds on the KBOB, EnergyPlus and Eurocode datasets by adding a detailed set of parameters to describe earth materials, calibrated against recorded laboratory field data. Estimated operational and embodied carbon impacts for European residential building typologies are presented up to 2050, in a temperate hot climate and based on IPCC future climate scenarios for earth/wood/concrete buildings. These results are compared with current and future French environmental regulations to assess whether earth construction could mitigate the impact of construction and operation on climate change. This study shows that a median earth-built single-family house typology, structurally sound, can satisfy future environmental regulations, provided that biogenic carbon sequestration and a low-carbon heating/cooling system are taken into account.