Introduction

Background

As embodied energy/carbon dioxide occupies large part of the whole energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions especially in the countries where the building construction activity is enormous, need for evaluation of them with scientific basis is increasing among building designer, developers, building material manufacturers and policy decision makers in many countries.
More important issue than the evaluation is how to decrease embodied energy/carbon dioxide in practice in building construction field.
As there is a large potential to decrease the embodied energy/ carbon dioxide due to the building construction according to the literatures, the measures will be great issue in Annex 57.

Objectives of Annex 57

1) To collect existing research results concerning embodied energy and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions due to building construction, to analyze them and to summarize into the state of the art
2) To develop guidelines of the methods for evaluating the embodied energy and CO2 emissions due to building construction
3) To develop guidelines of the measures to design and construct buildings with less embodied energy and CO2 emissions
4) To develop a project summary report overviewing the technical results of Annex 57