Picking up the PACE: How Embodied Carbon and C-PACE are Advancing the Decarbonization Roadmap

In partnership with New Buildings Institute, Nuveen Green Capital’s Head of Sustainability and Programs, Genevieve Sherman and the Sustainability and Programs team, recently co-authored an insightful white paper, Picking up the PACE: How Embodied Carbon and C-PACE are advancing the Decarbonization Roadmap, highlighting for the first time how C-PACE (Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy) financing can act as a driver to help the reduction of embodied carbon in new buildings.

C-PACE is a state policy-enabled financing mechanism that allows building owners and developers to access attractive capital to fund energy efficiency, renewable energy, water, and resiliency related components of commercial buildings. While C-PACE programs have previously been limited to reducing “operational carbon” by addressing energy use in building operations, the paper explores how C-PACE could be tapped to reduce the upfront “embodied carbon” of buildings, through providing low cost capital for novel, low-emission versions of materials such as concrete and steel.

Embodied carbon is the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions associated with materials production and the construction processes of a building or infrastructure. It includes any CO₂ created during the manufacturing of building materials and the transport of those materials, as well as construction practices used.

According to the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction’s “2022 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction,” buildings contribute to 39 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, with 28 percent originating from the ongoing operation of buildings and 11 percent arising from embodied carbon. As buildings become more energy efficient in their operations and local energy grids progressively decarbonize, the significance of embodied carbon emissions is expected to grow within the real estate sector’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions.

C-PACE is responsible for over $8 billion in commercial real estate improvements with $3.5 billion deployed in the past 3 years alone toward high performance new building construction. As increasing the collective ‘buy’ signal has recently been identified as one of the key market gaps toward scaling reduced emissions building materials, C-PACE is uniquely poised to increase awareness and implementation through tying the financing to the use of low-carbon building materials.

Click below to read the full white paper to learn more about the growing awareness of embodied carbon's impact on the environment, its crucial role in achieving carbon-neutral structures, and how C-PACE stands as a vital tool to support this transformation.