SOUR Launches Carbon Calculator

Annually, embodied carbon is responsible for 11% of global GHG emissions and 28% of global building sector emissions. [Architecture 2030, 2021] While the global awareness of embodied carbon in buildings is growing, the tools that allow industries to have project based awareness is lacking.

To take responsibility and encourage all to take action, SOUR has launched a new carbon calculator that measures the greenhouse gas impacts of construction activities in terms of carbon dioxide equivalency (CO2e). It does this by calculating the embodied carbon of constructed spaces and footprint of its supply chain activities. This tool is developed to estimate emissions based upon most up-to-date emission datasets, in order to raise awareness of carbon footprint and stimulate action. Through this calculator, SOUR offsets its estimate project carbon footprint through Cool Effect, a nonprofit organization which matches more than 90% of its donations with scientifically verified carbon reducing projects.

“Offseting is certainly not a cure for all and we should not rely on it as an on-going solution” says Pinar Guvenc, Partner at SOUR, “this tool is built so that we can have a better understanding of our footprint in our projects and we can address the reasons more effectively. We choose to offset in the process. This could be a useful tool for many others which is why we wanted to make it public.”

SOUR’s carbon calculator is cradle to gate scope. It incorporates the Carbon Leadership Forum’s global Embodied Carbon Benchmark Database of over 1,000 existing buildings and The North America Based carbon stocks of soil, delineated based upon ecoregion from a study in Nature published in 2021. As the calculator can help estimate both embodied carbon of buildings and footprint of supply chain, it can be used to get an estimate for both architectural projects and product sourcing. 

About SOUR

SOUR is an international award-winning architecture and design studio with the mission of addressing social and urban problems through sustainable, adaptive, and inclusive design processes. While the word, SOUR, is a play on the words social and urban, the meaning describes the studio’s attitude. Like the process of sourdough making, the studio believes in taking the time: to research, synthesize, and ideate in order to generate data-inspired and purposeful design solutions. The world has spent enough time sugar-coating, it’s time to confront, get real, and be SOUR.