Award will identify solutions to decarbonize transportation, buildings, and industryLever for Change has announced five finalists for the 2030 Climate Challenge, a $10 million award launched last year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the buildings, industry, and/or transportation sectors in the U.S. by 2030. The Challenge, sponsored by an anonymous donor, will fund proven, data-driven solutions ready to serve as a model for change in communities across the country. Among those announced is a project featuring researchers from CU Boulder:
Building with Biomass: Using Buildings to Sequester Carbon at Gigaton-Scale
The Carbon Leadership Forum at the University of Washington, in partnership with Endeavour Center, University of Colorado Boulder, and Building Transparency, proposes to convert buildings to carbon sinks by storing carbon in buildings using biogenic materials and reducing carbon emissions in all other building materials.
Wil Srubar, an associate professor at CU Boulder and Co-Founder of Aureus Earth, is heading the project on campus.
“We are very proud and excited to be part of this team. Our proposal comes at a critical time for the construction industry, which must curtail emissions associated with building material manufacture in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid a global climate crisis," said Srubar. "We see a tremendous opportunity to leverage the future building stock as an opportunity for carbon reduction and biogenic carbon storage. We envision a sustainable future in which buildings are transformed into carbon sinks. Our work would lay the critical socio-techno-economic foundations for an ecosystem of policymakers, material manufacturers, architects, and engineers that is required to make that vision a reality.”