Infrastructure Australia’s Embodied Carbon Projections for Australian Infrastructure and Buildings report forms part of our broader advice to support the Australian Government’s decarbonisation priorities and objectives. 

Using data sourced from our Market Capacity program, this report quantifies a baseline of the upfront embodied carbon in Australia’s built environment. The report finds that construction activity will produce between 37 and 64 Mt of CO₂e in upfront embodied carbon each year for 5 years to 2026-27. This is a total of 247 Mt of CO₂e over the period. 

The report also shows that close to a quarter of these emissions (23 per cent) can be abated by employing practical decarbonisation strategies by 2026-2027.

Infrastructure Australia puts forward 6 recommendations to the Australian Government to consider in its work towards the reduction of embodied carbon from infrastructure and buildings. These recommendations encourage the Australian Government to:

• Develop a comprehensive national plan to promote the decarbonisation of embodied carbon in the built environment.  
• Build confidence and literacy to enable the uptake of low carbon products and solutions across the built environment. 
• Continue developing a nationally standardised embodied carbon measurement system, which allows for consistent methods to collect, measure and assess data about embodied carbon
• Agree and implement a common national approach to drive market demand for low carbon solutions.  
• Develop new methods for project delivery which share risks and rewards for innovative approaches.   
• Work with industry to drive national alignment on low-carbon expectations through performance-based standards and specifications and identify faster ways to update them.