Embodied Carbon Management Toolkit Presentation

The City of Toronto has been collaborating with consultants Mantle Developments and Ha/f Climate Design through a TAF-funded study to develop an embodied carbon toolkit for municipal governments and construction projects.

The toolkit presents recommendations to manage embodied carbon over three key topics:

1. Construction circularity: reuse of existing structures and materials to minimize embodied carbon while reducing waste and minimizing resource consumption.
2. Urban design: design new buildings in the most carbon-efficient ways and avoid unintended consequences associated with high-carbon design features like transfer structures and setbacks.
3. Procurement of low-carbon materials: request low-carbon materials and construction processes in building and infrastructure design and construction.

The toolkit recommendations were developed in cooperation with working groups consisting of dozens of City of Toronto staff across various departments, through extensive LCA modelling, included research into current approaches and best practices, and were tested by working with a number of pilot projects.

This webinar will provide background context and introduce the Toolkit, inviting Ontario’s construction design, construction, and development community members to begin using it to reduce embodied carbon on future projects.

Our Speakers

Lisa King, Senior Planner, Strategic Initiatives, Policy & Analysis, City of Toronto

Lisa King has been a senior policy leader in the City of Toronto’s Planning Division for the last 18 years. Her tenure has been marked by significant contributions, particularly in leading the establishment of Toronto's Zero Emissions Buildings Framework and the Toronto Green Standard. These initiatives, focusing on new construction, aim to reduce energy use and emissions and promote nature-based solutions in the development sector. Most recently Lisa has helped to pioneer new embodied carbon research and requirements for new construction.

Ryan Zizzo, Founder & CEO, Mantle Developments (PEng, MASc)

Ryan is a recognized leader in helping large organizations and governments transition to a low-carbon future. Ryan's work has directly supported an update to the embodied carbon approach in the Toronto Green Standard version 4, North America's first policy to limit embodied carbon on certain types of new building construction. He has also contributed to the development of the Government of Canada's Standard on Embodied Carbon in Construction which requires low-carbon concrete on large federal construction projects. Ryan has worked with leading organizations like the YMCA of Greater Toronto to help quantify and minimize the carbon impacts associated with major construction projects.

Ryan holds a master’s degree in applied science in Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering from the University of Toronto, a Bachelor in Science and Engineering in Civil (structural), from Queen’s University, is a licensed engineer in the province of Ontario, and holds a LEED Accredited Professional designation in Neighbourhood Development. Ryan founded CLF Toronto. He was named one of Canada’s Clean50 for 2024.

Kelly Alvarez Doran, OAA, MRAIC

Kelly is a father, architect, educator, and activist. His holistic approach to the design of the built environment has been shaped by his experiences working across the world first in the resource development sector and at MASS Design Group’s East African office where led the design and implementation of several of MASS’s projects, notably the award-winning Munini District Hospital and the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture. Working in these contexts brought about a profound sense of a building’s provenance and the scales of social and environmental impacts inherent to the built environment.

In 2020, Kelly established the Half Research Studio at the University of Toronto to catalyze a conversation around the embodied carbon and life cycle impacts of buildings in Canada. The graduate-level studio has engaged over 30 leading offices, trained over 50 students, and published internationally acclaimed research demonstrating how and where a building’s carbon upfront impacts reside. The Studio’s research underpinned the embodied carbon policies co-authored by Kelly and adopted by the City of Toronto.

Kelly co-founded Ha/f Climate Design in 2022 to support designers, builders, and policymakers to halve the emissions of the built environment this decade. A Senior Fellow of Architecture 2030, and a member of the Royal Architectural Institutes of Canada’s Committee of Regenerative Environments, Kelly is a regular speaker, writer, and advocate for the integration of life cycle assessments into design thinking.