ASHRAE consulting on emissions quantification standard

The draft standard – called Quantification of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Buildings – is available for public comment until July 21, 2025.

Interested stakeholders can access the current version of the draft standard via the ASHRAE website. To submit a comment on the draft standard, click on this link, then log in and follow the prompts.

ASHRAE also has a list of all standards currently under review.

Aims of the standard

ASHRAE says Standard 240P is designed to establish a consistent methodology for quantifying both embodied and operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the entire life cycle of buildings and their sites. It also outlines minimum requirements for documentation of those emissions.

Major changes proposed from the first public comment draft include:

• Refined definitions for improved clarity and alignment with industry terminology
• Updated figure of life cycle stages that are included in the system boundary
• Revised global warming potential (GWP) metric, changing the default from GWP-20 to GWP-100
• Expanded guidance on quantifying embodied greenhouse gas emissions.

United we stand

According to ASHRAE, the standard aims to provide a unified platform that enables building industry professionals, government agencies and the finance and investment sectors to measure, report and act on GHG emissions in a clear and coordinated manner.

“Standard 240P is intended to bring clarity and consistency to how we evaluate embodied emissions throughout the building process,” says 2024–25 ASHRAE President M Dennis Knight.

“This standard offers a unified framework for GHG accounting, empowering the building industry and related sectors to work from a common platform to measure and report GHG emissions transparently and across a building’s life cycle,” said Ryan Colker, Executive Director, Energy, Resilience & Innovation for the International Code Council.

“This kind of cross-sector collaboration with ASHRAE is essential to accelerating the transition to a climate-resilient future.”

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