RIB Software launches free-to-use RIB Carbon Quantifier for optimized carbon quantification in construction.
RIB Software, a leading multinational provider of innovative technology solutions to the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, has partnered with non-profit organization, Building Transparency, to develop the RIB Carbon Quantifier.
Through a direct link with Building Transparency’s Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), the application allows users to quickly, easily and consistently allocate carbon environmental product declaration (EPD) values against their imported estimate data, including resource quantities.
This comes as studies highlight the industry’s impact on the environment, with construction constituting a staggering 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions and accounting for 36% of global energy demands.
René Wolf, Chief Executive Officer at RIB Software, says there is a growing need to reduce carbon emissions within the engineering and construction sector to combat the damaging effects of climate change.
“Until recently, the construction industry’s response to reducing building-related emissions has focused on energy efficiency by reducing operational emissions - the energy used to heat, cool and light buildings.
“While previously effective, this approach overlooks embodied carbon emissions associated with material and construction processes across a building’s lifecycle, which represents a quarter of the carbon emitted during the life of a building and 11% of all global carbon emissions.
“It is therefore critical to increase efforts to quantify, monitor, evaluate and ultimately reduce the embodied carbon emitted throughout the lifecycle of a construction project - and the driving factor for why RIB Software developed the Carbon Quantifier application,” explains Wolf.
Through a seamless integration with Building Transparency’s premier, free-to-use EC3 tool, the RIB Carbon Quantifier application is set to be the first of its kind in the industry to assist the built environment in extracting and quantifying embodied carbon data more quickly and efficiently, optimizing carbon quantification and reducing estimate delivery times.
Through this powerful partnership of technology, industry professionals will now have access to an additional toolset to optimize the efficiency in the quantification and measurement of carbon, thus better facilitating design and procurement decisions, helping the global AEC industry in achieving a lower embodied carbon footprint.
Stacy Smedley, Executive Director of Building Transparency, says reducing embodied carbon emissions is one of the biggest opportunities in the fight against global warming. “Partnerships, like ours with RIB Software, are critical to driving action in the building sector and identifying new solutions that make it easier to prioritize low-carbon decision-making on projects. It’s exciting to have our EC3 data and its large carbon impact database be utilized and leveraged for tools like the RIB Carbon Quantifier.”
The primary features of the RIB Carbon Quantifier include the easy extraction of embodied carbon data from Building Transparency’s EC3 database against estimates; keeping a repository of each estimate’s embodied carbon data for cross-referencing and facilitating easier allocation of carbon values for future projects; the ability to easily export aligned quantified data back to EC3 for analytics, reporting and dashboarding; and providing users with a direct integration with other estimating products within the RIB portfolio of products.
Wolf says the need to accelerate decarbonization practices in the AEC industry is critical, and using an application like the RIB Carbon Quantifier will not only allow users to optimize carbon quantification, but will ensure they avoid unnecessary energy spent and emissions generated from associated projects and processes.
“At RIB, we are driven by transformative digital technologies, industry best-practice and trends that help propel the industry forward and make engineering and construction more efficient and sustainable,” he concludes.
About RIB Software
Driven by disruptive digital technologies and trends, here at RIB we’ve made it our primary purpose to propel the industry forward and make engineering and construction more efficient and sustainable.