Teardown Index & Carbon Emissions
Quantifying the carbon cost of Vancouver’s teardown and rebuild cycle.
High land values in Vancouver create a strong financial incentive to demolish structurally sound homes and replace them with larger ones. Each teardown and rebuild generates substantial embodied carbon — the emissions from manufacturing and transporting building materials — that is not captured in operational energy accounting.
This 2018 paper, published in Energy and Buildings, uses property transaction data and building permits from the Teardown Index to estimate the aggregate carbon cost of Vancouver’s teardown cycle, and models how that cost changes under different land value and construction scenarios.