This is a critical environmental and social justice issue that goes beyond adding solar panels and eating less meat. Global majority and indiginous people around the world are calling on the wealthy nations to address our relationship to poor nations, which have for centuries been based on the extraction of resources for the profit of a few, but to the detriment of all. Indiginous populations make up only 5% of the world's population but have preserved over 80% of the world's biodiversity. In contrast, the US also makes up about 5% of the worlds population, but emits roughly 25% of the global carbon emissions. Wealthy nations must do everything in our power to curb our disproportionate amount of emissions, so that those with the ancient knowledge can lead us toward regaining balance. Sequestering carbon must be an essential part of the stragegy. Calculating embodied carbon emissions is a key step towards being able to quanitfy and then reduce, and ultimately, sequester carbon in the built environment. The time is short. We must act now.

Scaling and accessibility of the Life Cycle Assessments and Environmental Product Declarations - There is industry wide agreement that the tools are ready for primetime - Embodied Carbon Construction Calculator (EC3) enrolled over 10,000 users across the construction sector in 12 months – that was as of December 2020 - Real time digital outputs of EPD, for example in Concrete installations – installers are able to deliver the EPD upon delivery based on real materials

Software- Hurdles and Opportunities - Funding… We have adopted a “build it and they will come” philosophy. By securing widespread support for the initiative, the funding group or groups will naturally emerge - Federal funds - Programs: Buildings America as example - Timeline: 2-5 Years - Establishing an Embodied Carbon Baseline Building within the HERS Standards will be used to compare installed vs baseline for embodied carbon, similar to how the current HERS index uses a reference home as a baseline to calculate operational savings. -Embodied Carbon Baselines already exist – See State of Washington Concrete baseline study - Consistency – the RESNET Standards are well equipped to assure consistency in the Embodied Carbon marketplace - Maintenance: - the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) process is mature and growing exponentially over the past 24 months - Potential Software collaborations are available – Ekotrope is positioned to lead integration - Embodied Carbon Cosntruction Calculator (EC3) is open source and is an example of widely adopted LCA/EPD software

Workforce Development: - We anticipate substantial HERS Rating growth over the next decade - Presently approximately 2000 HERS Raters in the US – 550 in Texas alone, NEHERS has 226 rater members - The existing rater development pipeline can scale, and has simultaneously shown versatility across new market opportunities - HERS H20 as example - Federal, State and municipal Program Adoption is critical to rollout. - A new standard from RESNET on Embodied Carbon would encourage federal, state and local municipal program adoption.