Materials Embodied Carbon refers to the carbon emissions generated in the first three stages of a building material's life-cycle, (A1-A3), known as "cradle-to-gate" emissions. These emissions exist in the atmosphere before construction begins and account for 60-90% of the material's full life cycle emissions. At this time, the residential marketplace is not currently served by any comprehensive carbon standard and the lack of such a standard leaves room to shoot ourselves in the carbon footprint by building high performance buildings with high GWP materials in an effort to reduce operational emissions over time. It is imperative to develop a standard to include MEC now! Such a standard would create a scalable, vetted framework around which municipalities, program administrators, and other stakeholders could build programs. Standards make training and oversight consistent. Standards provide accreditation of professionals and tools, quality assurance, and verification of energy savings and performance for a variety of programs, including energy efficient mortgages (EEMs) and the EPA’s ENERGY STAR Homes Program, among others. In order to begin tracking reductions in MEC emissions, it is necessary to create a Reference Home by which to compare a Rated Home; we are running a benchmark study to establish a baseline by which future reductions can be compared. Developing the workflow for raters, integrating the software systems and rising to the challenge of determining how to set default values until more granular data is available are some of the logistics our group is sorting out. As these technical issues are resolved, opportunities will abound for forward-thinking HERS raters to include these calculations in the scope of their workflow and to be able to advise builders, architects and municipalities of up-front carbon savings, including the potential to store/sequester carbon in buildings, before materials are procured. This will impact a significant component of emissions related to construction of buildings that will make a difference within the 7-year time horizon we have to mitigate climate change. This new standard would also allow us to evaluate not only energy efficiency, but also carbon efficiency- both operational and embodied. We envision creating a single metric for calculating the damage to the atmosphere in (measured as CO2e tons*years) from both HERS models and Embodied carbon models for the same period of time. These metrics (one linear and one exponential) can be put together for the calculation of Total Emissions Impact Index for that period of time. (Total Emissions Impact Index = Rated Home Emissions Impact / Reference Home Emissions Impact * 100.). This will create an expandable standard which can incorporate data on other forms of carbon emission from other stages of the life cycle (like transportation or end-of-life emissions) as it becomes available. In creating the draft of the standard language we would like to propose, we are simultaneously defining how an entire industry can begin to quantify, track and reduce these up-front carbon emissions, while at the same time setting the baseline against which future reductions will be compared. This initiative will: - improve our communication and build a broader consensus around the important, urgency, and feasibility of reducing MEC emissions - significantly increase the number of buildings that can contribute to the solution and not the cause of the problem (while utilizing readily available materials currently in big box stores) - and incentivize a robust, dedicated and diverse workforce that can bridge across disciplines (architects, builders, engineers, appraisers, real estate agents, municipalities, utilities, and code officials) and be fully equipped to make a significant dent in the emissions from the construction industry, both new construction and renovations and additions, within the extremely limited time frame we have.