New York City’s construction industry is about to get a carbon reality check. NYU Tandon researchers are teaming up with the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice to set the city’s first embodied carbon benchmarks, turning dense lifecycle math into numbers that can actually be used in a meeting. The project kicked off in fall 2025 and is slated to deliver policy-ready findings this fall.
According to NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the year-long C2SMART study will knit together Environmental Product Declarations, lifecycle assessments and real project data to build carbon profiles for different building types. The team plans to express everything as carbon dioxide equivalent per square foot so agencies can compare one project against another without needing a PhD. Local coverage also spotlighted the effort and its timeline, as reported by Brooklyn Eagle.
“This data is the difference between good intentions and measurable outcomes,” project co-principal investigator Kaan Ozbay said, underscoring that the point is not another glossy report but a tool officials can actually use, according to NYU Tandon. With shared baselines in place, the researchers say agencies will be able to move beyond one-off pilots and start baking low-carbon choices into procurement and budget talks as a matter of routine.
How the study will measure embodied carbon
C2SMART explains that the method hinges on combining Environmental Product Declarations and lifecycle assessments with actual jobsite data from New York projects, working directly with contractors, designers and suppliers so the numbers reflect how the city really builds. The team will calculate carbon intensities for representative building typologies, then model what happens to carbon, cost and feasibility when lower carbon materials or designs are swapped in.
Where it plugs into city policy
The study is designed to slot neatly into PlaNYC goals and NYCEDC guidance that aim to cut embodied carbon roughly 50 percent for new buildings, infrastructure and major retrofits. Executive Order 23 already requires capital agencies to submit lifecycle assessments and Environmental Product Declarations and to pursue lower carbon specifications, giving these benchmarks a pretty direct route into future procurement rules, according to the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice.
What it could mean for builders
For developers and contractors, a clear baseline could start to reshape bid documents and supply chain decisions, rewarding lower carbon mixes of steel, concrete and reclaimed materials instead of treating them as niche upgrades. The city is already testing some of these ideas, including a timber glow-up in Canarsie that leans on mass timber to shrink embodied carbon, as reported by Hoodline. International playbooks such as the United Kingdom’s PAS 2080 have shown how benchmarked baselines can evolve into procurement and reporting rules elsewhere, per the Institution of Civil Engineers.
The research team expects to deliver policy-ready recommendations in fall 2026, after which agencies, developers and material suppliers will be able to measure their projects against New York specific numbers and track progress over time, C2SMART says. If those benchmarks are folded into procurement or Local Law guidance, low carbon concrete and material reuse could start to show up not just in sustainability plans but as line items on jobsite budgets and city contracts.
