Minimising carbon emissions through BREEAM
A critical step on an organisation's net zero carbon journey is minimising emissions from all sources. BREEAM helps to minimise your asset's emissions.
Carbon reduction credits in BREEAM include improving building fabric efficiency and encouraging the installation of low carbon technology, such as photovoltaic panels and heat pumps.
Net zero carbon and BREEAM
For more than 30 years, BREEAM has been helping buildings achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions at every stage of the building lifecycle, with approximately 50% of the credits available in BREEAM’s building certification addressing the reduction of carbon. The certification encourages the improvement of an asset’s core sustainability performance in many ways, including by working to minimise energy demand and carbon emissions from the construction phase through in-use operation and end-of-life.
Specifically, the following tactics have been put in place across the BREEAM family of standards to help guide organisations on their journey toward net zero operations:
- Accurately measuring the asset’s energy use and the associated carbon emissions.
- Recognising performance that exceeds existing energy performance benchmarks and regulations.
- Focusing on minimising the asset’s energy consumption through the improved fabric to reduce energy demand, using more energy-efficient building services and equipment and encouraging the use of on-site renewables.
- Recognising building features and practices that facilitate efficient energy management practices that avoid wasting energy during operation, e.g., commissioning of building services, accessible controls and submetering energy use.
- Recognising demand-side management capabilities to enable a higher proportion of renewable energy generation in the grid supply mix.
- Minimising the embodied carbon impact associated with building materials and the construction process.
- Maximise the use of recycled and reused materials in building and disassembly at end of life (circularity).
- Minimising operational emissions associated with water use and fugitive refrigerant gasses.
Reducing carbon emissions as far as possible is an essential first step for achieving credible net zero carbon status, and BREEAM is a valuable resource that can be leveraged to demonstrate emission reductions across a portfolio.
Elevating efforts: moving a step beyond emissions reduction
In addition to measures that are directly aimed at reducing assets’ carbon emissions, other aspects of BREEAM further address carbon reduction through assessment categories such Land Use and Ecology, Resilience and Transport.
Under Land Use and Ecology, for example, BREEAM promotes nature-based solutions that encourage the protection and enhancement of ecological features like trees, which increase the biodiversity of the areas surrounding a building. When executed correctly, these measures solve many challenges simultaneously — building resilience while effectively mitigating the risks of climate change.