 What is considered the built environment? ERIK defines the built environment this way. Built environment comprises the man-made elements of our surroundings, such as buildings, as well as infrastructure, including transportation, telecommunications, energy, water, and waste systems. As you can see, it is much more than buildings, and I encourage you all to think of the impact of the built environment. Not just the headquarter buildings, but warehouses, production buildings, utility buildings, infrastructure that powers all of them and the roads that connect them. We all talk about sustainability, but how do we define sustainability? Sustainability defined by the UN is more or less an umbrella term that says, sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In the built environment, sustainable design has predominantly been defined and measured by the LEED system. LEED framework brought needed awareness and tools to designers and contractors, as well as building owners. Using the LEED framework, sustainable design to date puts the focus on construction and operation of a building through its useful life. However, with our current approach to sustainable design, construction, and building performance, we are not addressing the take-make waste of the linear economy. The linear economy relies on continuous and affordable resource consumption and ability to dispose of large quantities of generated waste. By embracing sustainable design and LEED, we are currently doing less harm, but we need to do better than that. We actually need to do good. So as designers and architects, we're looking to regenerative design and circular design to build on the momentum we gain through sustainable design. A quick comparison between these two, and perhaps it's a little oversimplification, goes like this. Sustainable design is focused on the building performance. The timeframe of sustainable design is the life of the building, from construction to operation to demolition. Regenerative design, while also concerned with building performance, addresses the impact of the building on the surrounding ecosystem. The timeframe of regenerative design looks further to the past and to the future, considering the environment that existed before the building was built and the long-term impact of the structure on that environment. And circular design reaches out yet further to address the supply chain and the end of design life recovery of all materials and products that make up the building. So as we look to give back, let's dive a little deeper into regenerative design. Regenerative design can be broadly defined as design that reinforces natural systems in which all living systems depend for their continued well-being. Imagine buildings that produce more energy than they consume, clean the water they use, and purify the air they breathe. Regenerative design, as it specifically relates to the built environment, understands the building's relationship to the place through its life cycle, recognizes the needed regenerative capacity, becomes a partner to the place instead of purely extracting from it, and achieves harmony between the people and the place. The most widely accepted framework for regenerative design is the International Living Future Institute's Living Building Challenge. That's a mouthful. The Living Building Challenge asks the question, what if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place? The Living Building Challenge is organized into seven different pedals, seven performance areas. And I'll go through those just briefly. First is the place pedal. The intent is to articulate where it is acceptable to build, how to protect and restore the place once it has been developed. The water pedal. The water pedal realigns how people use water and redefines waste so that water is respected as a precious resource. The energy pedal. The intent is to design a safe, reliable, and decentralized power grid powered entirely by renewable energy. The health and happiness pedal. The intent is to create environment designed to optimize our well-being. The material pedal is to create materials economy that is non-toxic, ecologically restorative, transparent, and socially equitable. The equity pedal. The intent is to foster a true inclusive sense of community that is just and equitable. And last but not least, the beauty pedal recognizes the need for beauty to enrich our lives and to honor the impacts of the things that we make. How does regenerative built environment think about carbon? The goal of regenerative design is to reduce both embodied and operational carbon to carbon zero or carbon negative. When we say carbon negative, it's sequestering more than it is releasing. So a couple of case studies. An example of a regenerative design is the Sierra Grande PK through 12 school in Blanca, Southern Colorado. The Grand Zero building designed using passive house principles designed with a super insulated high performance envelope and powered by a PV array. The PV array in the building, the PV array for the building will produce as much energy as it consumes during a typical school year. Another example of regenerative design is the Living Certified RW Kern Center. The R Kern Center is a multi-purpose facility that generates its own energy, captures and treats its own water, processes and recycles its waste. The building includes classrooms, offices, community cafe and gallery and serves as the primary entry point of the campus. And then some of the pedal highlights for this building include the use of rainwater and gray water and net zero energy building achieved by PV array combined with a high performance envelope. Regenerative design is a basic tenant of the circular economy and circular design. Circular economy is a systematic approach to economic development designed to benefit businesses and society and environment. In contrast to the take make waste linear model circular economy is regenerative by design and aims to gradually decouple economic growth and the consumption of finite resources. Circular economy reframes consumption as a climate environmental issue. And the irony if you hear my dog barking is that is the garbage man that he's barking at. All right, circular design replenishes natural systems designs out waste and keeps materials in use. So circular design thinking is being applied at all scales from global supply chains to circular cities to individual projects requires systemic participation in a network of information. Circular business models are key to transformation from a linear take make waste to a circular reduce reuse recover economy in the design and construction sector. And must work alongside design strategies governance and regulations for the transition to be successful. And this graphic in particular shows the looping of the circular economy. Circular design as it specifically relates to the built environment is about maximizing utility of resources, extending product building and material life and providing a proper end of life recovery. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation resolve framework outlines six actions that can be applied to products, buildings, cities, or even entire economies. Find resolve framework to the built environment. The actions that might be taken are as follows regenerate regeneration. We've been talking quite a lot about regenerative is regenerating and restoring natural capital share. Occupy less space and minimize the amount of time the space it's idle asset optimization will result in less built environment. Optimize use digital technology to operate at a maximum efficiency and performance design space for flexibility and to be repurposed, accommodating new features through time. Loop create new uses for buildings or product materials through re-manufacturing recycling or upcycling design buildings and products for disassembly and material recovery. Virtualize replace resources with replace resource use with virtual use physical space with digital space. This will result in less material consumption and less resources used in travel. And exchange replace traditional building solutions with innovative materials and products designed for longer life cycles repair and disassembly replace product centric delivery with service centric delivery. Turning products for repair reuse or recycling and that's really begun in the carpet and the lighting industries. How does a circular design thinking address carbon circular economy and circular design offers this dynamic systematic response. Sorry. The circular economy and circular design offers systematic response by both reducing emissions and increasing resilience. An example of a project that applies circular design thinking is the wedge table. It's a natural foods market cafe and community gatherings face. This project also applied other strategies, but I'm focusing on the circular aspects of the project. The project purpose repurpose the 15,000 square foot 1960s building using the structure in the skin and adding in a little insulation there and taking advantage of its natural daylight. Two leading examples of circular design are the key quarter tower and the park 2020. This also had other strategies they applied but focused once more on the circular strategies. The key tower takes a 1970s tower at the end of its design life and repurposes it using 68% of its existing structure. Reclining and reshaping it creating flexibility and some methods of assembly and the 2020 park project. Designed all the buildings in the office part for disassembly and material recovery. Material passports allow materials to be identified categorized in the models for future use in upcycling. And I mentioned material passports. Buildings as material banks is a collective project with mission of enabling a systematic change in the building sector by creating circular solutions. Material passport is a tool that they developed to offer a platform and repository for storing, linking and providing relevant information on materials and buildings to relevant actors in the value chain. Material passports describe the characteristics of materials that give value for future recovery and they get used in the loop rather than returning to new and raw materials. So, with the idea of reusing and materials rather than extracting materials. We return to the discussion of carbon and embody carbon and sequestered carbon. So, this is a good time for Paul to take over and start discussion on carbon. Well, thank you Nina. I appreciate that overview of the progression or journey. You might want to call it that we've been on is designers of the government over the last few decades as we go on first from sustainability, which really didn't become a common term in our vocabulary until about the middle of the 1990s. All the way through today when we're starting to leave behind that term and started to embrace these newer principles for generative design and beyond that, even the circular economy. Before I get started, I would want to take a poll. Let me see if I can get this poll to work. Yes, there it is. Hopefully, are you seeing a poll on your chat screen. The poll questions this does your organization have an existing carbon footprint analysis the choices are yes and no. If you can see that please click on your vote. I'd like to know of the folks in our audience today, have you done a carbon footprint analysis, either in whole or in part for your organization. So, I'm not seeing any results yet so I'm not sure I guess I can click show results, and I'm not quite sure if I'm doing that right. There it is. No, I think that's not it. No polls. So, I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong here. Can people indicate to me and chat if you are seeing that poll and if you can vote on that. We're not seeing it yet Paul, but I'm seeing 75% or yes and 25% or no. And we'll see if we get participation on that. Okay, so you're saying 75% yes 25% no thanks Nina appreciate that. Alright that's great to know. And then there's a second question, does your carbon footprint include real estate so let me see if I can get to that next fall. I'm not sure how I go about getting the second one. Right there we go. Thank you. So, if yes those your footprint include your entire real estate portfolio, that is all the building for infrastructure, buildings grounds, roadways, landscaping and so on. With the organization has as part of its financial structure. So, when you see results Nina, can you tell me what they are. Sure, I'm giving it a moment because we're getting a few more responses. It looks like the overwhelming answer is no to that one. 25% yes and 75% no so far. Okay, that's exactly what I was looking for. And what's fascinating to me is a lot of organizations and corporations have begun carbon footprint analysis. But what I've seen so far happening out there is mostly the focus seems to be on the supply chain, not really paying close attention yet to their own real estate portfolios. So that's what we want to talk about today. So I'm going to go a little bit deeper here into the into the carbon footprint process. So those of you that have been through it probably quite aware of this but in the common use or application of carbon footprinting. We have three different scopes scopes one, two and three and you can see them there described on the screen. A scope one is actually pretty limited in that it's fossil fuel is used on your property or sites. It's your vehicle fleet, and it's any onsite landfill and wastewater treatment. That is not always a very significant or this not necessarily the largest share of most corporations or organizations footprint. When we move to scope to when we get into purchased electricity purchased heating and cooling and purchase potable water, which was going to the fresh water that we bring on to our sites. Then we really start to get into some of the significant impacts that an organization can have through its carbon footprint. And finally scope three are those that are slightly best direct employee commuting and travel, solid waste can be significant depending on the nature of your operation. And finally electrical distribution losses and electrical distribution losses are an interesting one. That's talking about the difference between the electricity that actually gets delivered and used at your site versus how much electricity actually has to be generated to the power plant. And in some cases some locations that can be a very significant difference. So those are the three scopes of carbon footprinting that are commonly referenced out there. We wanted to share with you that at Cunningham Group we have done our own carbon footprint. But you're seeing the results on your screen. So on the right hand side, you can see and now this was actually not this year, which would look very different. Of course, this was last year, when we still had very full traveling processes in place. We have six U.S. offices and two overseas offices. So no surprise an organization like ours, more than half of our footprint was traveling between office and project sites, going to clients, locations and to sites and meetings. So transportation you can see was 57% and of that air travel was by far the largest at 53%. Our buildings actually run around 22% and then there were a few other miscellaneous minor things such as paper, IT hardware. The big takeaway for us though when we did this analysis was that we were just over 5.7 metric tons per employee per year. Turns out that's about average for a large scale design firm. And based on this analysis, we established a goal working with our board of directors to completely offset or reduce that by the year 2022. So we have just another 15 months to get there. At which point we plan to be carbon neutral in our operations. Now, in addition to understanding the impact of our operations on the environment as designers, it's even more important for us to understand the impact of all the things that we design, the building projects, the landscaping, the sites that we create. And in one of the organizations that we really like that had driven a lot of change in that regard is this thing called architecture 2030. Architecture 2030 was put in place in the year 2006 and it set up these very simple goals that you see about decarbonizing the built environment. When it started, the goal was to reduce below the average building 60%. 2015 through 2019 was 70%. Today through 2024, the target will be 80%. And as you can see 2025 90%. And finally, by the 2030, all the design firms that have signed on to the architecture 2030 challenge have committed to seeking carbon neutral buildings. It's a very aggressive challenge and there's a lot of work to be done to get there. But that's what many of us are pursuing. And as part of being a member of this organization architecture 2030 a signatory to it, we commit to tracking all of our projects. We model all the energy that could be used in those projects as well as monitor that after they're completed. And we report the results of our entire portfolio that we design each year to this national database. And this is our report for last year. The only graphic I want to call your attention to uses one right over here on the left, the one that reads 49.9%. That was our total portfolio last year. Millions and millions of square feet of building hundreds of projects. We were sitting just about 50% reduction in carbon or energy from our buildings. Last year, the target was 70%. So we were 20% behind. So we are working very hard to close that gap. We hope to catch up within a few years. And interestingly, of course, today, this year, the target is even more aggressive and then 80% reduction. I want to give, give with you a share with you a visual depiction of Cunningham Group's total environmental impact. And we're going to start with just those internal operations that 5.72 metric tons per year. And that's pretty easily categories and visualize as you see right here. These are the main categories all the way from the tiny things like paper and IT hardware to the building energy it takes to keep our offices heated and cooled ventilated. And everything plugged in to the energy and carbon we released due to our commuting and finally all of our transportation. So there's that roughly 2 million kilograms a year. By the way is a good point for me to mention. This footprint for this year will be half or less. And what we're trying to do right now is actively determine what do we think it's going to be. Once we return for some kind of a new normal, would it be perhaps three quarters of where we used to be? We're still trying to figure that out as our many of our clients. But now let's put our internal operations in the context of the things that we design. And as architects we understand it's so important to walk the talk and to set an example for our clients and others. But really as a design for what we design is where we can make the really big difference. So let's compare our internal operations now reduced to that little block to the carbon impacts of everything we design in just one year. So now you're seeing all the natural gas and all the electricity that gets used by our new buildings in one year. This is last year. And now you can see that what we design in a year makes our internal operations relatively small in comparison. And now we're all the way up to 168 million kilograms whereas before we were just 2 million kilograms. But we can take this a step further, because there's another really important part of the built environment that we want to talk to you about. And it's this thing that we call embodied carbon. And let me explain to you what that is really quickly. So again, here's that internal operations. Here's all the operational carbon from the new buildings would have put in place in just a single year. And now here is the carbon emissions due to all the materials that as architects and designers, we specify and cause to be installed in our buildings. This is the interior products the carpeting the sheetrock, the ceiling tiles, the furniture that goes into our buildings. This is the envelope the enclosure the roofing the windows the walls that wrap our buildings and seal them from the outside. And finally this is the structure all the concrete steel and wood that actually holds things up. So now you can see we're starting to get to a really significant impact. We're up to half a billion kilograms of total impact again, just in one year. So you can see now that our internal operations, while important to us are actually much less significant than what we design and what materials we use. And there's one final piece to this story. And here it is I'm going to share quickly, an organization such as ours cutting hand group has been in business now for 52 going on 53 years. So our impact isn't limited to just what we design in a single year. We have an entire portfolio body of work of buildings out there that continues to use energy and to be responsible for greenhouse emissions. So now when we look at what's the annual impact of our entire passport folio, combined with everything we're doing on an annual basis. Now we're at this incredibly large number. And you can see now that our internal operations are just the very tip of an iceberg, a very large iceberg. In fact, I wanted to find a way to share visually a depiction of what this actually would look like how much carbon is that how much is that in the atmosphere at standard temperature impression. Well, it happens to be, it would be a sphere almost exactly a mile or 1.6 kilometers in diameter. So the challenge that we've accepted as a design firm is to take that sphere that's a mile in diameter, our carbon emissions every year, and to work closely with our clients past and present to reduce that balloon of carbon to nothing in 10 years by the year 2030. It's an enormous challenge and undertaking but that's what we're here to tackle. All right, so I think I have another poll. Let me see if I can pull up this poll. Let's grab this one. And okay, so there's a question. What sector of the economy is responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions? Is it transportation? Is it building? Or is it industry? So I'll give you just 15, 20 seconds. That should be pretty easy for you to take a guess or maybe you know the answer to this, but go ahead and give us your answers on this one. Nina, are you seeing any results yet? I'm not sure if you're muted, Nina. I can't hear you. I am giving it a moment. I saw a couple more come in. It looks like 40% are saying transportation, 20% are saying building, and 40% are saying industry. Oh, that's a really interesting split. I'm always fascinated the split of answers I get to that. And what I've observed through these, it really depends very much on the composition of the audience. Are there a lot of engineers? Are there CSOs, different kind of people? So I love that mix. So here, let's give you the answer now. Thanks for taking the poll by the way. And that was the last of our polls for today. So I'm going to close my window here. All right, so this is how we typically think about global CO2 emissions by sector of the economy. And this is a representation of the global emissions, but in reality, US emissions track this very, very closely, almost identical, not quite. So here you can see that the first take on this question, is it industry is the largest at 43% and that transportation and buildings are just about even with each other, 23 and 28% respectively, about a quarter each. But what we have decided to do recently is to dig a little bit deeper and understand what's buried in that big gray blob that you see labeled industry in this picture. And when we scratch the surface, what we find is that a very large share of the industrial sector is actually dedicated to creating and transporting the materials that end up where in the built environment. All the concrete, the steel, the glass, the process materials, they actually are a very significant part of worldwide industry. And you can see now probably where I'm heading. If I add up the 28% that's annual building operations, that is, you know, keeping our buildings heated, lighted, cool, ventilated, etc. If I add to that the 11% of worldwide industry that is directly related and dedicated to building materials and construction, all of a sudden, I find that the built environment materials and operations combined is 39% of global emissions. In other words, buildings in the built environment are in fact the single most impactful sector of the economy in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon. And so as architects, as designers of the built environment, we are both guilty of using this and we have a responsibility to do better. And it's that sense of responsibility we want to bring forward and share with our clients. So let me use a few more diagrams from our good friends at architecture 2030 who are very gracious and granting me the opportunity to share a few of their lovely slides with you. So when we think about the built environment now and carbon, there are three main topics that should concern us. The first thing is this top right new building operations. Actually, in terms of new buildings, there's a lot of good news. Building codes have progressed to the point where buildings are using less than half the energy they did about 15 years ago. We have many net zero energy buildings on the boards or in construction are already complete. So new buildings are actually on a trajectory to achieving these important goals of being net zero energy net carbon neutral. We actually have a much bigger problem with existing building operations today that enormous trillions of square feet of existing building stock across the world for which there's no built in mechanism to have those things upgraded and improved in terms of their carbon emissions. So that that's a remaining piece of the puzzle that needs tackling and probably will need some legislative intervention to make a significant difference. And now on that top left, this is the whole materials construction infrastructure piece. It's it's the new frontier for us as designers in terms of thinking about decarbonization, because it's something we ignored for a very long time. So we need to get much better at thinking about that 11% that is materials and construction. In fact, just as we have targets from 2030 for carbon reductions, a relative to new building design, getting to zero by 2030, we now have embodied carbon targets for all the materials collectively that we use and put into our buildings. And here are those targets right now. We believe it's easily possible to achieve a 40% reduction and we're heading for a 65% reduction in 2030 and zero emissions for materials by 2040. So you can see that's 10 year lag behind the progress we're making on operational carbon, but we want to follow a very similar pathway to both. All right, so a couple other aspects I just wanted to mention to you about embodied carbon in cases and the concept you've been hearing about or familiar with. So a few of the averages that we see out there, the structure, which is usually the steel the concrete, some of the earth that supports those the wood perhaps. That is where we have the most impact of embodied carbon of construction materials, and where we're putting the most attention in particular right now to concrete and then steel. Those those are materials that are enduring very close focus from scientists and engineers around the world. After that, the next most impactful part is the wrapping the enclosure of our buildings, the roofing the siding the windows the doors all those things that keep the weather out of our buildings. And finally interiors, all the carpeting sheetrock and things like that. Those are the 50% 30% 20% split that is designers we're starting to understand and to tackle a little bit better. In fact, we're at the point now and this is typical for for many of the better firms out there. We are doing carbon modeling I should say embodied carbon modeling on many of our projects fortunately there are great new software tools that allow us to do this relatively easily. So you can see that pie chart is showing a typical that was a smaller project of ours and you can see the percentage of contribution of global warming potential from each of the material categories that we used in this project. Now I want to switch gears just a teeny bit and talk about this thing we refer to as the global carbon budget. And you can see this chart. It's a very simple one. What this chart is getting at is if we look at emissions today of greenhouse gas. We are right at 40 gigatons that that's our annual output of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. We hoped it would be reduced drastically this year it's only dropped a team bit. Although that was nice to see a drop rather than an increase. But what we need to do as a society as a planet is we need to have a rapid decline in those emissions. In fact, we need to say that 40 gigatons is and was the peak. We should never have another year as high as 40 tons we need to continue to drop until we get to zero emissions by 2050. Now, if we were to achieve that that ambitious goal, we would end up emitting another 600 gigatons of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere. And that is not a good thing. 600 gigatons still leaves us terribly exposed to the worst ravages of climate change. We need to do better than that. So here's a suggestion to do better. Instead of 600 gigatons remaining that we can put into the atmosphere. What if we drop that to 500 gigatons? Here's what that looks like. We need to drop to 50% in the next 10 years and then a more gradual decline. That would give us a 50% chance of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change or 50% chance of keeping to 1.5 degrees C. Something that would be more comfortable that would give us a 67% chance of only getting 1.5 degrees would be this even more aggressive phase out. And what I'd like to suggest that your corporation or organization can look at this phasing out of global emissions and and have a curve that basically puts you on a very similar trajectory. Whatever your total carbon emissions are today, we'd like to see you drop 65% in the next 10 years and ideally phase out by 2040. That's a really simple model any of us can use in our organizations. So I want to walk you through hypothetical exercise. How would all of this apply to a hypothetical corporation that meets the characteristics you're seeing on that screen. I'm not going to read all those things to you a couple of highlights are suppose you have a million gross square feet of buildings. And that you have 2000 office workers and about 250 light manufacturing employees. You know, a fairly typical kind of mid-sized corporation. How would a corporation like that look at the ongoing issue of carbon emissions from its real estate portfolio. So we're going to map this graphically as simply as we can with greenhouse gas emissions on the vertical axis left and cumulative emissions over time on the right. So here's here's what a corporation like that would look like if I start to dig into its carbon. The first thing is going to be all the embodied carbon from the site. That's the landscaping the concrete the asphalt the loading docks the signs, all the things outside the building. And that's a pretty significant chunk of carbon and that carbon doesn't go away. Once those materials are there that carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere. But the site is much less than the buildings. So a million square foot of buildings are going to make the site seem relatively small. Now you start to see we're somewhere around 50,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas. So we're already up to somewhere on 22 metric tons for every employee. And it's very typical in the corporate world to have what we call an interior refresh every seven years or so. And that means that usually a lot or most of the interior materials are removed, sent to landfill and replaced. That's a very impactful thing that happens that seven year refresh. So it bumps up the embodied carbon another notch. Now let's look at what's the operational carbon doing. Okay, all the lighting heating cooling that's happening. You can see of course that starts out it's just a small bit every day and every year, but over time the operational carbon accumulates to very large numbers. Of course, the embodied carbon stays relatively constant and you see how those two relate to one another proportionately. Now what would be a strategy to start to reduce back up. So now I'm at 22 metric tons per employee of embodied carbon and every year another 5.9 metric tons of operational. That's a lot of carbon going out into the atmosphere. So here's some strategies that I could implement to improve that. The first one was what if I simply upgraded all my buildings to meet nothing better than the current building code. Assuming that the buildings may be 10 to 15 years old. I could bring them up to code that would then reduce instead of being that 5.9 metric tons. I'd be down here at that lower, lower line at 3.2 metric tons. Pretty big improvement. Right. Almost as much as it takes to offset all the embodied carbon. Let's take another strategy. Let's say that I wanted to upgrade one more step. Suppose I wanted to upgrade to this 2030 challenge. What does that look like? Now, all of a sudden I'm way down here to the point where the embodied carbon actually is bigger than the operational carbon even after 12 years. So I'm getting to have very efficient buildings now that you start to see what that picture looks like and I'm down to 1.2 metric times per employee per year. Pretty drastic reduction, right? But let's start. Let's try a few more strategies. Suppose when I have that seven year refresh, I implied 100% circular economy principles. Every product I use had some kind of circular story behind it. It's recycled. It's local. It's regional or the materials that I'm taking out instead of going to landfill are themselves being repurposed. So if I did something like that, all of a sudden that bump that you saw at seven years goes away and by embodied carbon actually stays flat. Well, I'm starting to do a lot better, right? And the next one is a very popular strategy right now. Of course, could I look at renewable energy? Absolutely. So suppose I put enough renewable energy costs at 100% of my annual operating cost. Now, to do that renewable energy, I have to first increase my embodied carbon because there's a lot of body carbon in the panels, the wiring, and everything it takes to get them there. So I bumped that up about another 10.4 metric tons. But that lets me flat line. So that big triangle of green, light green, that operational carbon is actually avoided by virtue of having invested in that embodied carbon. Can I do even better though? What if I said, you know, I'm not even happy with that bump up at embodied carbon? I'd like to do something about that too. So what if I installed even more renewable energy? Maybe now instead of putting on the roof, I had some over a parking lot perhaps. Now, what would the story look like? Well, I have to do that. I had to invest even more initially embodied carbon. But now I'm in a scenario where those panels are generating so much energy and avoiding so much emissions. I'm selling energy back into the grid. And therefore I am getting to a situation where after eight years, I'm back to carbon neutral on those panels. After those eight years, I'm now starting to offset some of the original embodied carbon that it took to build these buildings. So that would be a pretty exciting scenario to be involved with. Here's another strategy. It's a strategy I'm often asked, well, we've got all this landscaping and lawn area and pavement. Do we really need all that? Is there any way we could convert some of that? And the answer is yes. In fact, these big lawn areas are almost always net emitters of carbon dioxide. And the lawn is actually a pretty bad thing environmentally. If you can convert it to a landscape that looked more like this, all of a sudden, excuse me, you have a landscape that is sequestering carbon annually, which is a great thing. Unfortunately, on the scale of a corporation like this converting those 10 acres or so of lawn and pavement to woody landscape is a drop in the bucket. It'd be a great thing to do and we'd love to see all of our clients undertake something like this. But now we're only talking relatively few tons of sequestering happening. There's one other strategy I wanted to share with you. This is the last of these. This is about water. I wanted to go a little bit farther with water in this analysis, but it got a little too complicated for the purposes of our illustration. But there is a fair amount of embodied carbon, excuse me, operational carbon related to fresh water being brought to our operations and all the wastewater that's generated. And it doesn't have to be that way. This is the composting toilet array. Probably many of you on the call have seen this at the bullet center in Seattle. So it is possible to make a very significant dent in operational carbon by tackling the water issue as well. So here's a quick summary of things to think about when you ponder your carbon footprint and the real estate portfolio. Because as we now know the real estate portfolio is somewhere around 40%, almost 40% of carbon emissions and that 40% would apply to many of your organizations as well. So it starts really by looking at your buildings. When you're building new, there's so many things you can do now to minimize the embodied carbon going into those initial materials. And when you're renovating, you can use the circular economy principles in material selection and design to help shed some of that embodied carbon. And of course, there are all these strategies that we've just walked through. These aren't by any means the only or necessarily the best strategies that you can consider. That's always very much site-specific and company-specific. We work with our clients to select the strategies that best align with their values and goals and their financial circumstances. So these are just examples. I don't want to imply that this is the only or the best way to do this. So with that, I think I'd like to wrap up and just close it here and say I appreciate that Nina was able to talk to us about regenerative design and that progression from sustainable to regenerative to circular. And we really believe corporations and organizations can have a healthier relationship with the natural world if they follow this progression too. And we can use carbon accounting and footprinting as a primary tool in understanding our impacts on the environment and as a tool to drive positive change. So with that, I think Nina and I are ready to turn it over to questions and I will go ahead and stop sharing. Thank you. And let's see, we can kind of go to get back to Chad. I'd see one question was how to mine for materials during a building demo. And that probably refers back to this whole concept of buildings as material banks. And I even want to expand that conversation a little bit and go back to this other concept that was only briefly mentioned, but I think it's really exciting. And one of the things that we're seeing come about now it's being promoted in this sector is called a building passport. And a building passport just like the name suggests is a list of all the materials that go into a building and their fractional share. So it might say concrete 30% steel 20% etc, etc, etc. And the goal is that every building would eventually have a material passport. And suppose you are a municipality. I'm going to pick on Boulder right up just up the road from here because they're talking about this today. Boulder says what if when building permits got submitted that building permit included a material passport. We would then eventually know as a city of Boulder. Exactly, relatively close to exact how many tons of concrete and every building material we have here. And then when we start to think about the future construction economy. We could really understand what what materials need to be brought in and what materials already in place here that we can mine from those existing buildings. But the other really big thing to understand about mining and Nina also mentioned this. It's so much easier if the building is designed and built with that already in place for planning for disassembly. Then that's not too hard to think to do what we struggle with right now is almost all over buildings and very few new buildings have that in place yet. So needed you want to talk about some of the challenges you see with with designing. I think you kind of hit it. It's a it's a mind and the design thinking shift that we have to do be able to do this because, like you said, you know, you have to you have to consider how to pull it apart. From the day you conceive of the building itself. And you need to start tracking what you've got in it from the day and, you know, thanks to systems like BAM is coming up with and and some of the other BIM systems we're using to start tracking this. We can we can have a building that's a repository for materials and look at future mining of it. So yeah, thank you. You covered it pretty well Paul. Thank you. You know, and wood is a great example to we're seeing so much more would now use especially CLT or cross laminated timber. And that's a great thing because it's sequestering so much carbon. And my only concern around the use of that would not only one concern is that I want to make sure that that can be easily disassembled because if that would isn't this is can't be disassembled and used again in the future. Ultimately, it's going to go to landfill or it's going to get burned and that carbon that would become carbon emissions again, it'll only be a short term gain. So if wood is to have a really positive impact on the carbon problem in the built world, we have to use wood in a way that it can endure as structural material. Another question here, Paul. How does the US compared to Europe or Southeast Asia? We can talk about that a little bit. We do a lot of work at Cunningham in China. In particular, we've worked in other Asian countries. But we have a lot of good friends and colleagues in the European Union to and we've been talking about this economy and I think it's safe to say that northern Europe in particular has emerged as the leader in this circular economy development. There are several consulting firms there that have really pushed this concept and there are several cities, individual cities that have made very public statements saying we are going to become cities that fully embrace the circular economy. Now, once we're going to have material passports and look at building as material banks, we're going to be doing all these things. Some of those cities are London, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm. So if you do a little research on circular economy, you'll find those coming to the port. But we're pleased to report that the US is not too far behind. There are some bright spots here in the US. I mentioned Boulder earlier. The reason I mentioned that, they're on my mind because they have undertaken a circular economy effort and are just a year into the beginnings of that. There's also been some great work in Charlotte, North Carolina on the circular economy and the regenerative approach. So, although we're a little behind the EU we're catching up. Asia is interesting. Nina, do you have any thoughts, having observed our work in Asia for many years? I think I'd prefer to say that Europe is leading us and the rest of us are looking to follow some of the great examples we're seeing there. I think the things that we've sort of talked about earlier and you kind of touched on, a lot of this is a big, it's a systems change. It really takes information and knowledge sharing and a systems change to make it happen. We have to think about every piece of the supply chain and every piece of the way differently for how we share information about it, but how we go about putting it together, where we source it. And what we do when design life is complete. So, it's an evolution, if you will, and people are pushing it and it's moving quickly. And as you mentioned, there are several cities in the US that are really pushing it. Alright, we have another on here. You're going to read that one, Nina. That's a big one. Two major themes across sessions yesterday and today emphasize investors need and expect number one consistency and standards and measures and number two transparency and accountability and reporting. How well is the built environment industry doing to collaborate on addressing both standards and reporting toward measuring impact and meeting ambitious sustainability goals and challenges was necessary for a greater collaboration. If I need to repeat some of that I can certainly. Well, that there's a lot packed into that one question isn't I got to focus on this one. How well is the built environment is we doing to collaborate and addressing standards and reporting toward measuring impact. So, I mentioned this thing the 2030 challenge a few times. And that is sponsored by our national organization the American Institute of Architects. And so at this point there are over 300 firms that have signed on to and they are almost all of the larger firms. So those 300 firms represent probably the majority of all the construction activity in the United States. And in those 300 firms have voluntarily put together something called a design data exchange. We share open our information with one another. Now it is anonymous so we don't track it to individual clients, but but we can share with our customers our clients and society at large. Exactly how well we're doing is an industry toward the decarbonization goal. In fact, I can tell you that of all these 300 companies that reported the billions of square feet included there. We've provided 49% greenhouse gas emission last year. And I'm sure there'll be over 50% this year. So I think as a profession, we're doing pretty well on transparency and and sharing information and being open where I think we're lagging behind is the standards. It's still almost all voluntary. I mentioned building codes have moved and they've helped us. But again, building codes have only taken us about halfway where we need to get. So the really exceptional projects that Nina that you share that you put on the screen. Everyone of those projects is a case where a client said to the design team. I want to do way better than the code is requiring me to do. You know, it's an important value to me and therefore I'm going to express that and share that so I'm going to go beyond. I think there is tremendous needs for us as a profession and we need help from outside the profession to continue to move the standards that the governor activities. And I put a hint about this, the existing buildings are what really scare me. We, I think we need a legislative solution to force or compel over time and gradually the existing infrastructure to get better because without that it doesn't matter how good we make the new stuff. I hope that was the beginning is least of an answer to that complex question. Yep, there was a lot in that one. All right. I think the questioner says yes, thanks. So. All right, I think that's any more questions out there. And I think are we at our time. So. Thank you very much.