Just one more storey? The embodied greenhouse gas impacts of adding height, slab thickness, building code and design tranches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Societies across the globe are simultaneously trying to build much more housing while drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is precipitating debates about the nature of sustainable housing. ‘Conventional wisdom’ holds that taller buildings are worse for the environment coinciding with longstanding skepticism of height, yet the research and data is often anecdotal or incomplete and contradictory. This paper contributes to the discussion by examining how building height affects embodied emissions for new 5-to-20 storey reinforced concrete residential buildings. We find that while height contributes to embodied emissions, its impact is smaller than slab thickness and design tranches within the studied storey range, which offer more effective opportunities to improve resource productivity, reduce material intensity and associated embodied emissions, without reducing building function. Our findings encourage a shift beyond height-based restrictions, urging designers and policy makers to focus on design decisions to conserve resources, lower emissions, and support circular-economy objectives
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".