Anthony Hickling - Executive Director at Carbon Leadership Forum

Carbon Accounting and Management Podcast

Anthony Hickling has experience in environmental and social sustainability as well as nonprofit management and fundraising. His foundations in sustainable building are informed by experience at Presidio Graduate School where he received an MBA in Sustainable Solutions, as well as his work on the sustainability team at Webcor Builders in San Francisco. Through academic and professional experience he has learned to navigate the priorities of traditional business stakeholders while incorporating social and environmental externalities. From executing successful marketing plans to determining research priorities, Anthony believes that wide impact considerations and diversity of thought should be embedded into all decision-making.

Anthony’s Joins the Carbon Accounting and Management Podcast to Discuss:

• What embodied carbon is and why is it important
• The role of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) in making informed material choices.
• The EC3 (embodied carbon and construction calculator) tool: what it does and how it can be utilized
• The need for collaboration among building owners, developers, engineers, architects, and contractors

Anthyony’s Listener Takeaway: If there's only one thing that our guests take away from this conversation, what do you think it should be?

Talk about embodied carbon. Everybody has a different role to play, if you're a public company or a small company, or if you're a contractor or an architect, this has an impact on many different levels of your total carbon emissions within the scope that you control. It's really important that everybody is both aware of this impact, but then also asking for decision makers to be playing a role in reducing embodied carbon. So talk about it. Ask for environmental product declarations. Ask your designers what their plans are to incorporate embodied carbon reductions in their designs. I think that right now, that's really what we need to make sure that this is scaling as a regular approach to how we design and build.

Timestamps:

03:56 Neglected carbon impacts in the built environment.

08:51 Including carbon in building design decisions.

10:10 Tools to help reduce building design's environmental impact.

16:41 Contributing to reducing embodied carbon impact.

17:44 Prioritizing reducing embodied carbon in projects.

22:49 California's policies reducing embodied carbon emissions.

24:10 California requiring construction emissions reductions for large projects.

28:55 Requesting data to encourage suppliers to prioritize accessibility.

34:23 Addressing embodied carbon reduction collaboratively.