In a significant step toward advancing India’s low-carbon development pretensions, the RMI India Foundation has boosted its work on embodied carbon assessment in the domestic construction sector, uniting with leading institutional mates to develop nationally harmonious marks. The action, which began in 2022 with a primary assessment in cooperation with the Lodha Foundation, has now expanded to a public scale through a common trouble with the Building Accoutrements And Technology Promotion Council (BMTPC). Together, the associations aim to make a comprehensive frame that can help engineers, builders, policymakers, and material suppliers measure, compare, and eventually reduce the embodied carbon intensity of India’s fleetly expanding erected terrain.
Embodied carbon—the emissions generated during the birth, manufacturing, transportation, and construction stages of structure accoutrements—has surfaced as a critical area of focus encyclopedically. While functional energy effectiveness has long dominated India’s climate and structure policy conversations, the growing use of energy-ferocious accoutrements, such as cement and swords, has brought embodied carbon into sharper focus. With millions of new homes anticipated to be constructed in the coming decades, the climate impact of accoutrements used at the moment will shape the country’s environmental footprint for generations. This growing mindfulness led RMI India Foundation to begin by asking foundational questions. What’s India’s current embodied carbon footprint in domestic construction? How does it compare with transnational marks? And what should India aim for as it transitions to a lower-carbon construction paradigm?
The association’s original evaluation, carried out alongside the Lodha Foundation, handed early perceptivity into embodied carbon intensities in common structure typologies. The primary analysis revealed that RCC-frame construction in India carries an average embodied carbon intensity of roughly 360 kgCO₂e per forecourt meter. Monolithic concrete structures—a decreasingly popular technology in the affordable casing sector—showed an indeed advanced intensity, comprising around 400 kgCO₂e per forecourt meter. These numbers, though reflective, underlined the urgency of creating further grainy and representative data sets to guide policy and assiduity decision-making.
Fulfilling the need for public-position assessment, RMI India Foundation expanded its services through a new collaboration with the BMTPC, a crucial institution under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs known for promoting innovative, sustainable structure accoutrements and technologies. The cooperation aims to establish public embodied carbon nascences and marks that reflect India’s different construction practices, climatic regions, and material force chains. With India’s domestic sector poised for unknown growth, similar marks will play an essential part in helping inventors and policymakers understand current performance while relating pathways for decarbonization.
To drive this work forward, RMI India Foundation, BMTPC, and the Lodha Foundation convened an expert symposium, bringing together experimenters, structural masterminds, engineers, material manufacturers, lifecycle assessment specialists, and sustainability professionals. The gathering was designed to make an agreement around a harmonious and scientifically robust frame for measuring embodied carbon in domestic structures. The symposium served as a platform to debate methodologies, review transnational norms, and identify gaps and challenges unique to the Indian environment.
One of the central themes bandied about was the description of lifecycle assessment (LCA) stages for the embodied carbon dimension. While global fabrics live, their connection in India frequently varies due to indigenous construction practices and limited vacuity of original emigration data. Actors meditated on which stages—from raw material birth to on-point construction and end-of-life considerations—should be included to represent the full carbon footprint directly. The discussion explored how India might strike a balance between global community and original practicality.
Another crucial focus area concerned defining physical compass boundaries for assessments. In India, erecting configurations varies extensively, and differences in material quality, force chains, and construction approaches can significantly impact carbon intensity. Experts examined how to ensure harmonious boundary delineations so that embodied carbon computations for different systems can be reliably compared. This included conversations on whether to include temporary construction accoutrements, point structure, and supplementary factors, each of which adds complexity to assessments.
Area normalization, a pivotal factor in comparing embodied carbon across varied domestic typologies, was also explored in depth. Actors honored the challenges in defining erected-up area computations, especially in surrounds where sundecks, common areas, service corridors, and open spaces are treated else by inventors and controllers. Establishing an invariant approach, they emphasized, would enhance the community of standard data and ameliorate integrity in reporting.
Data gaps and hypotheticals surfaced as another significant challenge. India’s construction accoutrements sector is vast and varied, and emigration data for numerous accoutrements—particularly region-specific or traditional accoutrements—remain meager or inconsistent. The symposium addressed the need to strengthen the embodied carbon measure database for accoutrements generally used in India, including cement kinds, sword types, summations, bricks, and arising low-carbon druthers. Actors emphasized the significance of erecting a dependable emigration measure, “waterfall,” supported by transparent hypotheticals and open-source data where possible.
The event also stressed the pressing need for deeper collaboration across stakeholder groups. Embodied carbon reduction, actors agreed, requires coordinated action involving government bodies, inventors, engineers, masterminds, academic institutions, and material manufacturers. The symposium underlined that embodied carbon mitigation isn’t simply a specialized challenge but a systemic one that depends on mindfulness, requesting metamorphosis, and policy alignment.
For RMI India Foundation, this cooperative approach is central to its vision. The association expressed gratefulness to its mates for their participated commitment and benefactions, emphasizing that robust public marks can only crop through collaborative trouble. As India works toward a sustainable future, these marks will form the backbone of strategies to reduce emigrations across the construction lifecycle, encourage the relinquishment of low-carbon accoutrements, and support policy interventions similar to green procurement fabrics and voluntary standing systems.
With the foundational work now afoot, the action is poised to reshape India’s approach to embodied carbon in domestic construction. RMI India Foundation and its mates remain focused on heightening stakeholder engagement, spanning data collection, and enriching the logical frame. As these discourses continue, the trouble promises to help India’s erected terrain transition toward a further climate-flexible, resource-effective, and low-carbon future—supported by substantiation, collaboration, and participated ambition.
BMTPC
Embodied carbon
RMI India Foundation
