C. De Wolf (SXL) for a lecture at UC Berkeley

Within the “Technologies for Sustainable Societies” Class in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of California, Berkeley, Catherine De Wolf teaches 45 students about embodied carbon in building structures. Whole life cycle emissions of buildings include not only operational carbon due to their use phase, but also embodied carbon due to the rest of their life cycle: material extraction, transport to the site, construction, and demolition. With ongoing population growth and increasing urbanization, decreasing immediate and irreversible embodied carbon emissions is imperative. Therefore, this class illustrates the ongoing benchmarking efforts for assessing embodied carbon with feedback from a wide range of stakeholders – architects, structural engineers, contractors, policy makers and rating-scheme developers. The lecture shows low carbon design can be achieved through structural exploration.

Technologies for Sustainable Societies Class in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley