Automatic carbon tool in Singapore

Growing interest towards carbon neutrality have led to the proliferation of carbon footprint calculators (both online and software) to aid building professionals in quantifying the carbon impact of buildings. While carbon calculators can ease design-carbon quantifications and expedite design decision-making, the use of such carbon calculators is often tedious, time-consuming, and difficult due to the need for extensive input data, lack of dependable localized carbon data, transparency, scalability, and interoperability. This is especially true in Singapore’s context where the building industry at large, still new to the concept of carbon impact and computation, lack operative knowledge on carbon computation and local carbon models or standards to refer to. Hence industry players find it difficult to integrate carbon computation in current work processes.  Keeping with Singapore’s carbon agenda to achieve carbon reductions by 11% below business-as-usual levels by 2020, the paper presents a new carbon tool that facilitates carbon management and carbon tracking in the planning and design of Singapore industrial developments. The new carbon tool focuses on 4 key innovation:  

1. automation of carbon calculation with minimal user intervention,
2. interoperability with prevalent design and simulation tools,
3. a single consistent carbon calculation methodology that is scalable throughout all stages of development, and
4. transparency and usability of carbon tool.

Through literature studies, analytical and empirical studies, embodied and operational energy are identified as key contributors of carbon emission in buildings. Fundamental technologies and methodologies encapsulating the mentioned features forms the basic software framework, allowing the new carbon tool to be used for design-support activities and allowing users to maintain a carbon perspective throughout design.