The Living Building Challenge™ is an attempt to dramatically raise the bar from a paradigm of doing less harm to one in which we view our role as a steward and co-creator of a true Living Future. The Challenge defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment today and acts to rapidly diminish the gap between current limits and the end-game positive solutions we seek.

This research explores the carbon impact of current Value Engineering (VE) practices in Australia. To accomplish this goal, a complex mixed-use building in Sydney was modelled to determine the capital material costs and initial embodied carbon emissions before and after the VE process. The results support the suggestion of a positive relationship between embodied carbon and capital cost, as outlined in the literature.