How Buro Happold is scaling whole life carbon assessments with AI

Buildings account for roughly 40% of global emissions, and for decades the industry's response has concentrated on operational energy: heating, cooling, and lighting. That focus has worked, but it has also changed the problem. UKGBC's most recent progress report found that UK built environment emissions fell by only 14% since 2018, against the 24% reduction needed by 2024, and that embodied emissions have risen rather than fallen over that period. As operational carbon drops, embodied carbon, the carbon locked into materials before a building even opens, becomes the larger share of the total.

Regulation is starting to catch up, unevenly. London requires major developments to submit a whole life carbon assessment at planning stage, and a private member's bill modeled on the industry-proposed Part Z amendment could extend mandatory reporting across the UK. The EU's recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive will require life cycle carbon disclosure for large new buildings from 2028 and all new buildings from 2030. In the US, state policy and certifications such as LEED are driving similar demand ahead of any federal mandate.

Rahul, associate sustainability consultant at Buro Happold, points out that London's mandate still covers only around 10% of the city's proposed developments, and less than 5% nationally.

"This isn't a precision problem, it's a scale problem," he said. Under a workflow that takes three to six weeks per assessment, a tenfold rise in demand would outstrip the number of skilled professionals available to deliver it.

 Buro Happold's response starts before a single EPD is selected. At the early design stage, the firm runs parametric modeling to test multiple structural and material options at once, comparing carbon, cost, energy, and daylight trade-offs while the design is still flexible enough to change. Rahul frames the priority as one of value, not volume: "Our role should be to identify the best value carbon decisions, not just the lowest numbers." 

The next bottleneck sits later in the process: matching hundreds or thousands of cost plan line items to the right Environmental Product Declaration. Buro Happold built an application, powered by a large language model, that reads material descriptions from a cost plan and matches each one to a suitable EPD. The tool draws on predefined datasets such as reference projects or industry sources like ICE, or searches the full One Click LCA database directly through the Materials API, which also returns EPD-specific resource types and technical specifications to reduce mapping error. The output is an Excel file of EPD names mapped to cost plan descriptions, ready for import into a One Click LCA project.

Johanna points to what that frees consultants to do instead: it lets the team spend more of its time on the conversations that shape a project, not just report on it.