Planning Application Carbon Evaluation and Reduction (PACER) Platform

The majority of the National emissions budget will be used in the built environment. This will include both the embodied carbon (manufacture, transportation, construction) and operational carbon (power and heat). Together, we refer to these as Whole Life Carbon (WLC).

Local Authorities are the gatekeepers to lower WLC in this carbon-heavy built-environment because they govern which construction-work gets planning-permission.

Until very recently, planning-applications to Local Authorities did not include carbon-calculations and yet took months to approve(6). Local Authorities are now allocated a shrinking carbon-emissions budget to be allocated across their jurisdiction yet have no tool to quantify carbon accurately and consistently across the hundreds of pages of unfiltered long documents that pass their desks.

Based on many years' of work by academics who lead in this field globally, Preoptima has already built an automated software tool, PreoptimaBUILDING, to minimise WLC in the built-environment by providing a Carbon Twin for a building, from concept to demolition. This is used by architects and designers to shine a light on the carbon impact of every individual design choice that they make. From the earliest conceptual stage, PreoptimaBUILDING explores all the variations of design parameters that have the biggest impact on carbon (for example shell and core materials, floor to ceiling height, grid dimensions, proportion of glazed area) using real structural equations and geolocated regulations. For each design variation PreoptimaBUILD calculates accurately the material quantities required. PreoptimaBUILDING has the proven ability to reduce Whole Life Carbon, typically by 25% to 40%.

In this project, the leading London local authority in carbon-reduction, Westminster City Council, collaborates with UK-based SME Preoptima to develop and demonstrate a cloud-based **Planning Authority Carbon Evaluation and Reduction** (PACER) platform, a quick, reliable, accurate tool to validate whole life carbon assessments of designs at the click of a button! It will do so in a standardised manner allowing traceability and transparency and, vitally, will result in lower whole life carbon building designs that adhere to standards and regulations.

This £379,909 12-month project will develop urgently-needed PACER within WCC and demonstrate its potential to cut WLC in the built-environment.

Westminster City Council is keen to tackle this bottle-neck for itself and its peers nationally to leverage the enormous potential carbon savings in the built-environment, radically improving the pathway for UK's national Net Zero commitments due to its impacts of **4Bn kgCO2e/year** in the UK.