Sasaki Releases Early Design State Carbon Calculator

Developers can perform iterative carbon goals and benchmarking for later detailed design phases.

Global design firm Sasaki has released an early-stage carbon goal and benchmarking tool to let property designers experiment with approaches before committing to final stages.

The company said that the new product, Carbon Conscience 2.0, “supports district-scale, early-phase, whole-project-life-cycle analysis inclusive of site and building data.”

The version 2 suffix refers to a previous beta version. It “incorporates feedback from experts, users, and both academic and professional peer reviewers; and represents the first full ‘gamma version’ of the Carbon Conscience platform,” the company said. “By providing Carbon Conscience to the design community as a free and publicly accessible tool, Sasaki hopes to empower designers and planners with data to more effectively advocate for low-carbon design, early in the design process.”

“Carbon Conscience 2.0 includes a completely rebuilt landscape architectural dataset, developed through Sasaki landscape architect Chris Hardy’s research as part of his 2023 Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship,” they wrote. “Hardy created a landscape baseline materials database for 148 unique materials and product typologies, as well as a new model based on cited literature for ecosystem and softscape sequestration projections, inclusive of biomass, soil organic carbon, and allochthonous carbon. This work supports Climate Positive Design. It will also be part of the American Society of Landscape Architects Climate Action Plan’s next generation of decarbonizing design tools and resources.”

The approach sounds like something often done in engineering, with extensive use of reference designs and design data about specific successful applications. But such clearly established solutions that can be plugged into real-world needs aren’t availability when it comes to carbon reduction.

As researchers in China and the UK noted in a 2022 paper: “The challenges of building design are as follows: lack of (1) a comprehensive standard system considering different factors, (2) lack of a carbon emission calculation method for the design phase, and a (3) no real-time optimization model aiming at carbon reduction.”

Without established and proven design approaches, working up a solution for any problem or application requires far more work. Experimentation and iteration become necessary as designers and engineers feel their way toward adequate solutions. Performing whole-project design in this way could let architects, developers, and builders over time address critical environmental issues that will continue to grow in importance for regulatory compliance, tenant customer satisfaction, and investor concerns.