Carbon / reduction & offsets
The Gold Standard is an advanced standard that accelerates climate security and sustainable development efforts by certifying initiatives' impacts on both fronts, with enhanced safeguards and stakeholder engagement for environmental and social integrity.
The Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Program is a leading global GHG crediting initiative, funding emission reduction projects that enhance livelihoods and nature conservation.
The Carbon Trust’s route to a Net Zero Standard helps organizations measure and manage their emissions, inform carbon reduction strategies, and align targets for the future – all with tailored advice from our trusted experts.
Zero Carbon Certification provides a vision for a future of carbon positive buildings that reverse the effects of climate change. By addressing both operational and embodied carbon emissions, Zero Carbon Certification offers organizations a valuable tool to demonstrate credible climate action.
Urban Decarb marks a significant step in utilizing embodied and operational carbon as design parameters in urban planning by looking at the city as a whole – from buildings to roads, parking, landscaping, and infrastructural urban systems.
Carbonfund helps individuals and businesses to calculate and offset their environmental footprint, supporting projects that offer diverse co-benefits like improved air and water quality, habitat protection, and job creation.
Terrapass offers specific carbon offset standards, ensuring transparency and quality in projects spanning reforestation, sustainable development, GHG emissions reduction via wind power plants, and more, for a cleaner, global future.
Native collaborates with organizations to implement climate solutions that align with their values, supply chain, and sustainability objectives, maximizing the positive impact of their carbon offsets by supporting new projects that reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
Carbon Removal Standards Initiative ensures rigor and accountability in the Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) sector through the uniquely powerful mechanism of regulatory standards. This initiative provides technical assistance and capacity building for carbon removal policy, focused on quantification standards.
Carbon / concrete standards
CarbonStar is a tool that sets standards for calculating embodied carbon of concrete.
CarbonCure offers a complete guide to low carbon concrete.
CarbonPlan provides a tool for analyzing the implementation of climate programs to ensure that they line up with the science.
Carbon / calculators
Carbon Conscience 2.0 is a carbon calculator that allows users to test and iterate at crucial stages when the design is most flexible enabling designers to establish carbon benchmarking and goals for the project’s detailed design phases.
CARE Tool allows users to compare the total carbon impacts of renovating an existing building vs. replacing it with a new one.
SOUR's carbon calculator measures construction activities' greenhouse gas impacts in CO2e by assessing embodied carbon in constructed spaces and their supply chain during construction.
Carbon Conscience App is a interdisciplinary tool to compare projected embodied Carbon emissions, Carbon sequestration, and Carbon stored, for your master planning, urban design, and concept design projects.
Rewiring America includes comprehensive Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) implementation strategies, and a calculator to map each community's potential on multiple levels.
Pathfinder helps you learn how to reduce carbon footprints and sequester more carbon. By participating, you can actively contribute to climate change solutions.
The Zero Carbon Tool gives an overall picture of how key decisions made at early stages of design can impact the project's total carbon use and allows architects and designers to analyze and estimate the carbon equivalent of emissions associated with all aspects of the project.
The CarbonSpan Calculator will be made available to teams on Perkins&Will's Digital Practice and can be used to translate embodied, operational, site, refrigerant, and renewable CO2e impacts into annualized and total kgCO2e impacts, so that these variables could be understood as a part of one picture.
Climate Finance Calculator allows users to consider economic and emissions factors to indicate how responsibility for climate finance could be allocated across countries. The calculator offers valuable insights for discussions related to climate finance, loss and damage.
Carbon / tracking
Greenhouse Gas Protocol sets the standards to measure and manage Green House Gas (GHG) emissions.
GRACED is a global daily CO2 emissions dataset from fossil fuels and cement production.
Global Monitoring Laboratory measures the carbon dioxide data on Mauna Loa constituting the longest record of direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Restor enables transparent monitoring of global restoration projects between diverse organizations.
The Bloomberg Carbon Clock is a real-time estimate of the monthly CO2 level.
Climate Trace tracks human-caused GHG emissions with unprecedented detail and speed.
Climate Action Tracker is an independent scientific project that tracks government climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement aim of pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.
Climate Watch is an open data platform that brings together dozens of datasets to let users easily search, analyze, and compare countries’ climate progress and commitments under the Paris Agreement.
Climate Policy Tracker distills government support for technologies and practices that remove and store carbon — an essential piece of achieving net-negative emissions.
Embodied Carbon Policy Map from the Carbon Leadership Forum, tracks over 230 government policies at all levels — local, state, national, and international — aimed at reducing embodied carbon emissions in materials and construction.
Carbon Removal Map is an interactive tool for visualizing the global carbon removal ecosystem. It aims to offer a comprehensive view of the Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) landscape to better explore the breadth of CDR initiatives.
Google Earth Engine detects changes, maps trends, and quantifies differences on the Earth's surface.
Carbon Monitor is an international initiative providing for the first time regularly updated, science-based estimates of daily CO2 emissions.
Bright Sparks Map is a global directory of proposed and enacted carbon removal policies for advocates and analysts. Viewers can filter by type, status, and level of government.
Carbon / toolkits
Climate Toolkit, from Metropolis, provides tools to learn about the basics of low-carbon solutions and develop a common language for talking about carbon in the built environment.
AIA-CLF Embodied Carbon Toolkit for Architects serves to provide architects an overview and the necessary steps to be taken to reduce embodied carbon in their projects.
Embodied Carbon Toolkit for Building Owners by CLF helps building owners meet net zero commitments that include embodied carbon reductions through scope 3 GHG and other sustainability commitments.
Upfront Carbon is the carbon emitted in the production phase of products and materials, from mining and processing of natural resources, transport to processing sites, and the manufacturing phases.
Climate Positive Design Toolkit helps you learn how to increase carbon sequestration and reduce carbon footprints from fifty tips and tricks.
Resilience Design Toolkit is a guide to designing for resilience developed by HKS and AIA. It aims help architects on all types of projects assess potential hazards objectively and mitigate the effects of these hazards through design.
The US Climate Resilience Toolkit offers over 500 digital tools to build resilience and a framework to identify and mitigate climate hazards, aiding in building resilience and addressing climate-related risks.
Resilient Design, developed by ASLA, is a dynamic toolkit for landscape planning and design, featuring case studies and resources showcasing multi-benefit systems, small-scale solutions, and the vital role of landscape architects in making communities more resilient.
BeZero Carbon is a carbon ratings agency that equips world-leading organizations with the knowledge, tools and confidence to make better climate decisions with an aim to scale investment in environmental markets that deliver a sustainable future.
Path To Zero Carbon Series is an ongoing initiative to research, summarize, and prioritize the most important actions we can take across all emissions sources on projects within the built environment.
CDRai is a large language model (LLM) that supports and deepens a rigorous, science-based understanding of carbon dioxide removal (CDR). OpenAir Collective members develop and maintain this free resource for the general public, policymakers, journalists, and civil society organizations.
Carbon / monitors
MSR Design has created a sustainability metrics template sheet that gets incorporated into a project’s drawing set to convey performance intent in a more standardized way.
Land & Carbon Lab has created an ecosystem monitoring system in collaboration with the University of Maryland. The system detects disturbances to any kind of vegetation cover, including forests, grasses, shrubs, and even crops occurring anywhere on Earth in near real-time.
Kaleidoscope is designed to supplement a whole-building LCA in early design phases. It is meant to be a reference for the order of magnitude of early LCA decisions, allowing designers to quickly compare the embodied carbon impacts of various standard building systems and design options.
Carbon / trends & strategies
Carbon Removal Alliance is bridging the gap between policymakers and innovators working to remove carbon from our atmosphere.
Climate Desk from The New York Times, collects reader’s frequently asked questions about climate change and provides answers in plain-spoken terms.
Carbon & Climate / visualizations
Carbon Visuals turns data into visuals to make sense of big environmental challenges – climate change, air pollution, water and resource use. At the personal, local or global level.
Climate Impact Map is a team of economists, climate scientists, data engineers, and risk analysts that are building the world’s most comprehensive body of research quantifying the impacts of climate change, sector-by-sector and community-by-community.
Climate Maps & Interactive Data provides timely and authoritative scientific data and information from NOAA Climate.gov about climate science, adaptation, and mitigation. Visual information helps people understand climate change and make decisions about managing climate-related risks and opportunities.
Climate Visualization Studio is a NASA initiative that produces visualizations, animations, and images to promote a greater understanding of Earth and Space Sciences.
Climate Time Machine is a NASA initiative that provides this series of interactive visualizations that show how some of Earth's key climate indicators are changing over time.
Climate Change Graphs from the New York Times provides 30 climate change graphs to explore our planet’s warming oceans, intensifying storms and rising air temperatures, as well as its greenhouse gas emissions and climate solutions.
Climate Viz of the Month is created by Zachary Labe, a climate scientist whose research interests include disentangling patterns of climate change from climate variability using data-driven methods, especially in the Arctic.
Climate Forward from The New York Times, includes news and insights for a warming world frequently accompanied by graphs and interactive data visualizations.
Climate Visuals by Professor Ed Hawkins (National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading) develops graphics that show different aspects of how the climate is changing and are all free to use with a CC-BY 4.0 license.
NYTimes Climate visualizations depict the changing impact of climate change around the world, in our cities and neighborhoods, and impacting our lives. (January 2020-October 2024)
Climate / trends & strategies
The Centers for Environmental Information offers climate trends affecting ecosystems and for developing adaptation and mitigation strategies.
CLIMATE SCOUT connects climate with architecture to help users create better-performing, responsive buildings by providing climate-specific design advice for the building site and scale.
NCEI National Centers for Environmental Innovation has developed a climate monitoring tool providing historic trends and current data sets.
Carbon Drawdown is a part of CMG’s mission to improve social and ecological wellbeing holds increasing significance due to the threat of climate change.
Climate Infrastructure focuses on strategies to help shrink the carbon footprint of the built environment and help communities adapt to the effects of climate change.
Systems Change Lab aims to spur action at the pace and scale needed to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges: limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), halting loss of biodiversity, and building a just and equitable economy.
En-ROADS is an online simulator that provides policymakers, educators, businesses, the media, and the public with the ability to test and explore cross-sector climate solutions.
Climate / toolkits
Campus Climate Justice Toolkit by College Educated is a comprehensive resource that empowers college communities to address climate issues effectively. Climate justice intersects with various social justice issues, including race, gender, and economic inequality. Understanding these intersections is crucial for developing effective climate policies that address the needs of all communities.
