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Embodied carbon constitutes a significant portion of a building's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is a key challenge for the construction and real estate sectors. Embodied carbon includes construction product manufacturing, building construction, material replacement and end of life. During the specification and procurement stage, designers and contractors have the opportunity to prioritize products with lower carbon footprints. Environmental product declarations (EPDs) are a growing source of environmental data in the construction products market, and are increasingly being used for (1) environmental performance assessment of buildings and (2) product comparison for procurement decisions during the later stages of building design. An obstacle to identifying and purchasing lower embodied carbon products is a lack of data quality and the transparency of EPDs. However, EPDs vary widely in their data quality and specificity, which can lead to inaccurate and misleading comparisons. A new method is presented to account quantitatively for estimates of variation in underlying data specificity in EPDs to enable fairer comparisons between EPDs and to motivate the reporting of actual variability and uncertainty in EPDs. The application of this approach can help purchasers to assess EPDs quantitatively. Practice relevance Life-cycle assessments (LCAs) and LCA data can be used within the construction sector to evaluate buildings and to assist in design, specification and procurement decision-making. A new method is presented to support the assessment of comparability of functionally equivalent materials and products during the specification and procurement stage. Given the known variation and lack of precision within EPDs, this method provides quantitative metrics that correlate to a qualitative interpretation of EPD precision. This method can be used by anyone who is using EPD data to make product comparisons at the specification and procurement stage: • It provides more confidence in choosing low-carbon material or product options when comparing between functionally equivalent options. • It can incentivize product manufacturers and LCA practitioners to improve data quality and transparently report known variation in their EPDs. • It may also motivate manufacturers to reduce GHGs from their products and processes.

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The Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) has sponsored a project by the Applied Technology Council (ATC) to develop next generation performance-based seismic design guidelines, FEMA P-58, that can be used to design new buildings or upgrade existing buildings to reliably and economically attain desired performance goals, and to assist stakeholders in selecting appropriate design performance goals for individual buildings (ATC, 2011). The project includes the establishment of a methodology for predicting the earthquake performance of buildings characterized in terms of probable life loss, repair costs and time out of service resulting from earthquake effects, expressed in a variety of formats useful to different stakeholders and decision makers. As part of this effort a Performance Assessment Calculation Tool (PACT) has been developed to gather and organize building information, perform loss calculations and evaluate loss information.In the spring of 2011, the project was expanded with the initiation of the ATC 86 to develop a draft methodology to quantify the environmental impacts (in terms of carbon footprint and other measures) of seismic damage and potential environmental benefits of performance based seismic design and retrofit. The project team is currently developing strategies to link life cycle assessment data to the damage and repair estimates generated by the P-58 methodology and as of December 2011 is approximately half way through the project. This paper outlines the seismic and environmental performance measures being integrated by the ATC-86 team and identifies critical issues to address as the project moves forward.