Carbon management for customers, industries, and the world

The Earth will continue without us if society doesn't confront climate change. The biosphere will adapt, even if the earth will become warmer, more inhospitable, and more hazardous due to climate change. Only for humans, climate warming poses an existential threat. The earth would survive quite fine if humans never returned.

As someone whose job it is to focus on business solutions for societal problems, I think about this all the time. We need to stop climate change because of the impacts it will have on future generations. Hence, the urgency I feel as I lead Autodesk’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) and impact work. And the satisfaction I find in knowing we are providing our customers with tools to turn the tide on global carbon emissions.

Our customers and their industries impart significant social value. They design and build infrastructure, cars, and phones—all the things society wants and needs. Yet the same industries are associated with 60%[1] of total greenhouse gas emissions. We need to decarbonize these industries, and everyone knows it–it’s now a question of how, and at what pace.

We are converging on the how (less energy and less materials, better energy and better materials) while the pace of change is rapidly accelerating. In a survey of six industry sectors, we found that nearly 90%[2] of respondents plan to adopt technology solutions to manage their carbon footprint. These industries understand that mitigating their cost to the climate makes business sense and adds to their already tremendous societal value.

We’ve always had big ambitions; this year, you’ll see how we’re continuing to deliver on them, especially when it comes to carbon management. Here are a few customer examples from the report that outline how we are enabling this industry transition.

To manage operational carbon, the firm uses Autodesk Insight to accurately model the impact of design decisions on the overall energy consumption of each project. For embodied carbon, Lake|Flato uses Tally, the first lifecycle assessment app that works with Revit to calculate the environmental impacts of building materials. Tally’s list of materials and quantities imports directly into the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), an open-source tool built by Building Transparency and developed with nearly 50 industry partners including Autodesk. The result is a more efficient workflow that optimizes both tools’ capabilities.

Carbon management requires limiting carbon emissions and aggressively removing the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. California-based startup Heirloom is bringing to market a solution that will do just that, using investment from the Autodesk Foundation.

Heirloom’s cost-effective, scalable direct air capture removal solution uses natural processes and naturally occurring minerals enhanced with technology and automation. Their solution helps minerals absorb carbon dioxide in days, injecting the captured and processed carbon underground to be monitored and stored for thousands of years. And they can do it for 3-4 times less cost than other solutions. Given the energy required to pull carbon from the atmosphere, Heirloom focuses their installations on or near renewable energy generation sites.

Autodesk software solutions and the Autodesk Foundation’s investment are providing the support Heirloom needs to advance the design, build, and commercialization of its technology. Together, we aim to achieve Heirloom’s mission of removing one gigaton of carbon dioxide by 2035.

Autodesk’s Impact Report shares many more examples of how we’re equipping our customers and other innovators to solve the climate challenge. Please check it out and learn about the industry transformation that is now happening and will allow for the world to go on—with us.

Source: Autodesk news