EPIC

The Early Phase Integrated Carbon (EPIC) assessment is a free whole life carbon tool built to support climate-positive design decisions in early project phases when data is scarce but the potential for emissions reduction is high.

To overcome the scarcity of data, EPIC uses a model that combines regionally-specific background data, forward-looking projections, peer-reviewed findings, and common sense assumptions to assess the relative impact of a variety of carbon reduction measures on a project’s embodied, operational, and landscape carbon footprints.

Aggressive time-based targets have been set for the built environment as part of a society-wide strategy to combat the climate crisis.

To meet these targets, quantification of the project’s whole life carbon footprint cannot wait until later project stages, at which point many impactful decisions have already been made.

EPIC is designed as the first step in an iterative low-carbon design process, setting out strategies and project-level targets that can be refined throughout the project lifecycle.

EPIC is useful to project teams: -in setting a whole life carbon budget for a project. -to evaluate the most impactful strategies for reducing whole life carbon emissions at the very beginning of a project, when data is scarce but the potential for reducing emissions is high. -to roughly approximate whole life carbon emissions from a project when completing an energy model and a wbLCA is not practical.

EPIC is designed to allow a user to enter a strict minimum of project parameters and to test a wide range of the most meaningful carbon reduction strategies.

These parameters are insufficient, of course, to describe the complexity of any real project.

In rough terms, EPIC is designed as a conceptual parallel to ‘shoebox’ energy or daylight models—the results do not correspond directly to a specific building but can help us to understand which strategies could perform well, are unlikely to succeed, or are worthy of more attention. .