How the New EC3 Tool Raises the Bar on Collective Action

Fifty years ago, we were a divided country, but we also went to the moon by agreeing to work together on a common goal.

That challenge required stepping out of our competitive silo’s and focusing on something that couldn’t be solved by any one entity alone. It also involved starting down a path before we had all of the answers in order to meet the goals. We did, however, know a direction we wanted to go in and we had a collective motivation to act.

What is our next moon shot? When looking at the “win at all cost” mentalities of our current politics, it is no doubt discouraging to people on all sides. We do, however, face daunting challenges today, and we could use more collective efforts where we chose to work together for a common cause. One of these next moonshot challenges is how we, members of the building community, respond to climate change.

Time is not our friend on this one. If we are to have success, we need to quickly move out of our individual silos and engage the collective of the building community: owners, architects, engineers, contractors, and material suppliers. If we can find common causes where we can work together, we can set forth thoughtful ideas, and scale their speed of adoption.

A recent example of how this can happen in the AEC industry is the development of the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3). Nearly 50 industry partners came together to develop and deploy this groundbreaking cloud-based tool. It is free and open access. It helps building teams evaluate a project’s overall embodied carbon emissions during design and procurement decision making, making it easier to compare like materials, and enabling the specification and procurement of the lower carbon material options.