The Race to Zero Carbon: Assessing Infrastructure's Carbon Footprint

The paper deals with the importance of assessing environmental impacts in the construction sector within a political and scientific context of growing awareness of risks associated with climate change. The European Union is an example of launching the European Green Deal after the Paris Agreement to decarbonise the continent. Construction is identified as a priority sector for intervention. Generally, a building is considered a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions at various stages of its life cycle. The infrastructure sub-sector emphasises certain materials, such as steel and concrete, recognised as substantial contributors to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. These materials are often essential for construction and rarely substitutable with alternatives featuring lower emissions. In this context, the accounting of CO2 emissions for a building, and more specifically for an infrastructure, becomes notably relevant both as an environmental reporting activity for businesses and as an opportunity to identify critical stages in the life cycle. This identification, in turn, focuses on processes for mitigation strategies. The AMICO research project (Account Method of Infrastructures embodied CarbOn) was conducted to develop a tool to analyse and evaluate carbon emissions and energy resource consumption associated with the design and construction of infrastructure. The current achievements of the project are described. The contribution is organised into three parts covering the state of the art, the methodology of AMICO's development, and the results obtained from simulations using the tool.