(Photo by iStock/CHUYN)
When people think of climate change, they tend to picture smokestacks, tailpipes, or high-rise buildings. They rarely think of the bridges we cross, the tunnels we pass through, or the roads that hold our cities together. Yet cement, steel, and asphalt are among the most carbon-intensive materials in the global economy. The World Green Building Council reports that buildings and construction together account for roughly 39 percent of global energy-related carbon emissions, with approximately 11 percent attributable to embodied carbon (the emissions locked into materials during extraction, manufacturing, and transport). Once a bridge is poured or a tunnel is lined, those emissions are fixed.
As a structural engineer, I encounter this gap in practice. When I specify materials for bridges and structural systems, I know that the carbon consequences of those choices are fixed the moment concrete is poured or steel is erected. For most of my career, embodied carbon was not a standard part of design conversations. That is beginning to change, not because of any single technology, but because of coalitions: Groups of actors who do not typically work together, finding ways to align around a shared problem.
Infrastructure decisions shape which communities bear the greatest burden of carbon-intensive construction and which gain the resilience benefits of forward-looking design. But reducing embodied carbon in infrastructure is not a narrow technical problem. It is a systems challenge at the intersection of procurement, materials science, community development, and public finance. When a state agency requires lower-carbon materials in public works, it simultaneously shifts supply chains, changes how engineers specify products, and creates opportunities for manufacturers who have invested in cleaner production. When a city mandates pre-demolition salvage audits, it connects environmental goals with local employment in deconstruction and reuse. When engineering firms benchmark their embodied carbon performance against peers, they create professional norms that ripple across thousands of projects.
Seen this way, infrastructure decarbonization is a social innovation agenda, with an outcome that no single actor can produce alone. Engineers cannot change procurement rules. Policy makers cannot redesign structural systems. Nonprofits cannot scale material reuse without data from engineering firms. But each holds a piece of the solution.
The four cases that follow illustrate how coalitions are forming to connect these pieces, from established results to work that is still nascent or struggling.
1. Procurement Power and ‘Buy Clean’ Policies
In October 2017, California Governor Jerry Brown signed the first “Buy Clean” law in the United States, requiring suppliers of four categories of materials used in state-funded projects to submit facility-specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) disclosing the global warming potential (GWP) of their products, as well as empowering the California Department of General Services (DGS) to set maximum acceptable GWP limits at the industry average and review those limits every three years (while, by statute, only adjusting them downward, ensuring that standards tighten over time).
The coalition behind this policy brought together actors with distinct but aligned interests. State agencies, including the California Air Resources Board and Caltrans, established reporting requirements and enforcement. The BlueGreen Alliance, a national partnership of labor unions and environmental organizations, built the political case for the legislation and subsequently launched a campaign to bring Buy Clean to other states. The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) engaged in the policy design process and supported the development of industry-wide EPDs. (Domestic steel producers operating electric arc furnaces, which have lower carbon intensity than the blast furnace production common among international competitors, had a competitive interest in transparency requirements, making industry participation a matter of market advantage rather than mere compliance.)
California spends approximately $10 billion annually on infrastructure, so requiring carbon disclosure as a condition of bidding on public work uses the state’s purchasing power to create a competitive market for lower-carbon materials without mandating specific production technologies. This approach has limitations, of course; Buy Clean laws cover a narrow set of materials, and the original California law notably excluded concrete, the single most carbon-intensive material in most infrastructure projects. The requirement for facility-specific EPDs also imposes costs on smaller manufacturers who may lack the resources to produce them, raising concerns about market consolidation. And the downward ratchet mechanism, while powerful in principle, depends on the quality and consistency of the underlying data, which varies across material categories.
Since then, nine states have enacted Buy Clean laws or equivalent standards: California, Oregon (2022), Colorado (2021), Washington (2024), New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. Colorado’s law extends beyond buildings to horizontal infrastructure, covering roads and bridges. New York established GWP standards specifically for concrete mixes in state building and transportation projects, becoming the first state to do so for concrete. In November 2024, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) awarded $1.2 billion to 39 state departments of transportation under the Low Carbon Transportation Materials (LCTM) program, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, to support the use of lower-carbon concrete, steel, asphalt, and glass on federally aided highway projects.
In early 2025, the Trump administration rescinded Executive Order 14057, which had established the federal Buy Clean program. But state agencies and the U.S. Climate Alliance have continued to house and lead the partnership independently, showing that the coalition infrastructure built over seven years has durability beyond a single administration. For structural engineers, the shift is tangible: An EPD is no longer an afterthought appended to a submittal, but is part of the initial procurement decision.
2. Circular Construction in New York City
While procurement policy can reshape markets, New York City illustrates how a public agency can move beyond setting standards and begins actively building a coalition around circular construction. In March 2024, New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) released Circular Design and Construction Guidelines applying across its roughly $9 billion capital portfolio. But the guidelines were one component of a larger strategy, a Green Economy Action Plan that projects 400,000 green-collar jobs in New York City by 2040, with an explicit commitment to creating pathways for residents from environmentally disadvantaged communities. The social innovation dimension is structural, not decorative: Circular construction is not only an emissions reduction strategy but part of an economic development and equity agenda.
New York’s approach centers on building a coalition around implementation. In 2024, Buro Happold hosted cross-industry convenings with contractors, salvage specialists, material innovators, and design teams across project boundaries, connecting what comes out of one deconstruction project with what goes into the next. Cornell University’s Circular Construction Lab, working with the CR0WD Network, contributed state-level policy analysis, while Brooklyn-based architecture studio CO Adaptive conducted salvage operations at the Hunter College Brookdale Campus, the first major project to follow the city’s circular guidelines.
The real test of this coalition is now underway. The construction of SPARC Kips Bay, a nearly two-million-square-foot science and research campus at Hunter College’s Brookdale Campus in Manhattan, is expected to create more than 15,000 total jobs and generate $42 billion in economic impact over 30 years; NYCEDC estimates that circular construction methods on the publicly funded portions of the site will reduce embodied carbon by 26,400 metric tons, equivalent to taking roughly 5,800 cars off the road.
The challenges of circular construction at this scale are substantial, requiring coordinating the timing of materials coming out of one building with the specifications of another, across different contractors, different schedules, and different structural requirements. Storage, certification, and insurance for reclaimed materials remain unresolved at the system level, and while the matchmaking convenings organized by Buro Happold revealed demand, they also exposed the gap between aspiration and logistics: Participation was limited, and the reuse stories that emerged remain, as Buro Happold acknowledged, in draft form. Much investment will be required to make reuse work at commercial scale, as reliable rather than heroic. At least seven additional construction projects in New York City have begun rethinking demolition for deconstruction since the guidelines were published.
3. Professional Accountability
Structural engineering is fundamentally conservative, and for good reason: Structural failure is catastrophic, so the profession defaults to proven materials and established methods. An unintended consequence has been that carbon reduction entered mainstream structural practice very slowly. The SE 2050 Commitment Program is changing that from within the profession, and it is doing so through peer accountability. (I contribute nationally to the SE 2050 initiative and co-lead the Bridge Group within Infrastructure 2050, so I write here both as an observer and as a participant).
In 2016, at the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) at the University of Washington, an interim working group developed a data-driven commitment for structural engineering firms to pursue zero embodied carbon in buildings. In 2018, Frances Yang of Arup and Wil Srubar of the University of Colorado Boulder proposed the SE 2050 Challenge to the Sustainability Committee of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI), a division of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). In December 2019, the SEI Board of Governors voted unanimously to support the program, and by April 2020, it became an official initiative of SEI.
Participating firms sign a formal commitment and then develop an Embodied Carbon Action Plan (ECAP) organized around education, reporting, reduction strategies, and advocacy. They also input project-level embodied carbon data into a shared database, building a national dataset that enables benchmarking across regions, building types, and structural systems.
The program’s 2024 Annual Report already documents measurable shifts. Firms tracking embodied carbon at early design stages, when material choices have the greatest influence, have doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent, and firms including project case studies in their ECAPs rose from 17 percent to 27 percent. Firms reporting limited resources to conduct whole-building lifecycle assessments fell from 11 percent to 5 percent, suggesting that the analytical tools are becoming more accessible.
The peer accountability makes this a coalition rather than simply a voluntary program. Firms benchmark their performance against one another and public signatory badges create reputational incentives. When a firm’s competitors are publishing ECAPs and reporting data, the internal pressure to participate becomes professional rather than ideological. Younger engineers, who have grown up with climate literacy, can use this transparency to advocate for change within their organizations.
That said, SE 2050 is voluntary, and the firms signing on tend to already be inclined toward sustainability. The harder challenge is reaching firms that see embodied carbon as a compliance burden, who constitute the majority of structural engineering practice. Moreover, the program’s focus on buildings leaves a significant gap, since most of the concrete and steel in the built environment goes into infrastructure. That infrastructure gap has led to Infrastructure 2050, an effort to extend embodied carbon reduction to bridges, tunnels, ports, roadways, and utility systems. (I co-lead the Bridge Group within this initiative.)
The work is difficult. Bridge engineers are accustomed to optimizing for strength, cost, and constructability, and adding a fourth variable into a profession that moves slowly, for good reason, requires patience, data, and above all trust among peers. However, downstream effects of this professional momentum are becoming visible in codes and standards. The American Concrete Institute published its first low-carbon concrete code, ACI 323, in 2024, creating a pathway for jurisdictions and agencies to adopt lower-carbon concrete specifications.
4. Disaster Recovery and the Opportunity to Rebuild Differently
This final case is not a story of a mature coalition producing measurable outcomes, but of a crisis that reveals why such coalitions are so urgently needed. Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26, 2024, leaving a trail of destruction across the southeastern United States. The most severe damage occurred in western North Carolina, where flash floods and landslides caused catastrophic harm to roads, bridges, and water systems. FEMA allocated $33 million for emergency replacement of public bridges across eleven counties, and more than 10,500 families received federal funds to rebuild and repair private-access roads and bridges. Total federal recovery spending in western North Carolina exceeded $2.7 billion, including over $2 billion for debris removal, more than 15 million cubic yards.
As a structural engineer, what strikes me about these figures is not just the scale of destruction but the rebuilding pattern they imply. Historically, disaster recovery replicates the same designs: Damaged bridges are replaced with equivalent structures using the same materials and methods. Each replacement locks in decades of embodied carbon. Each design that replicates past fragility ensures the community faces the same failure in the next major storm. The cycle is expensive, carbon-intensive, and inequitable: The communities most exposed to repeated climate disasters are often those with the fewest resources.
Cross-sector coordination in Helene’s aftermath has been primarily humanitarian, focused on restoring access rather than reducing embodied carbon. Restoring damaged private roads and bridges in communities that public budgets cannot easily reach is important work, and its coordination model—connecting federal resources, faith-based organizations, and local communities around specific infrastructure needs—demonstrates exactly the kind of cross-sector alignment that could, in future disasters, be designed to incorporate lower-carbon materials and modular construction.
The policy mechanisms for such integration already exist, but in the aftermath of a disaster, speed dominates every other consideration. Communities need bridges rebuilt in weeks, not months. Specifying lower-carbon concrete or evaluating modular alternatives takes time that emergency managers do not feel they have. The coalition that could connect low-carbon materials programs with disaster recovery does not yet exist in any operational form. Building it would require pre-positioning lower-carbon specifications in state emergency procurement protocols, so that when the next storm hits, the default option is already the better one.
Major hurricanes and floods produce billions of dollars in infrastructure reconstruction. If even a fraction of that spending were directed toward lower-carbon, more resilient designs, the cumulative impact on both emissions and community outcomes would be significant. The precedents from procurement, reuse, and professional accountability coalitions described above suggest what such a disaster recovery coalition could look like.
What These Coalitions Teach Us
Three patterns distinguish the coalitions that are making progress.
1. Incentives that make participation rational rather than heroic. California’s Buy Clean law leveraged $10 billion in annual infrastructure spending to create competitive pressure among suppliers. NYCEDC embedded circularity targets into its $9 billion capital portfolio, making circular construction a condition of doing business with the city. SE 2050’s signatory badges and peer benchmarking create professional incentives. Firms participate because their competitors do, not solely because it is the right thing to do. The lesson for social innovators: If your coalition requires altruism to function, it will not scale.
2. Embed equity from the outset rather than adding it as an afterthought. NYCEDC’s guidelines are part of a Green Economy Action Plan with explicit workforce commitments. SPARC’s $1.6 billion contract operates under a Project Labor Agreement, and a Community Task Force shapes public realm design. Bridging Together’s focus on private roads and bridges serves the most isolated families, those for whom a washed-out road means complete disconnection from employment, healthcare, and schools. Equity is not a secondary benefit of these coalitions. It is part of what holds them together.
3. Peer and market pressure normalize climate responsibility faster than regulation alone. The competitive dynamics among structural engineering firms in SE 2050, the growing number of states whose Buy Clean laws send coordinated demand signals, and the cross-project convenings in New York City all create shared expectations that make lower-carbon practice the emerging norm. But this dynamic has a shadow side: Firms and jurisdictions that are not part of these networks feel no pressure at all. The gap between leaders and laggards is widening, and the coalitions have not yet found a reliable way to close it.
Looking Forward
Nine states have Buy Clean laws on the books, and the U.S. Climate Alliance continues to coordinate the multistate partnership even as federal policy shifts. NYCEDC’s guidelines are being tested on an active $1.6 billion project, with deconstruction underway and at least seven additional developments rethinking demolition for deconstruction across New York City. The SE 2050 signatory base continues to grow, and the April 2026 SE 2050 Summit at Structures Congress in Boston will convene engineers from across North America to share case studies and deepen collaborative networks. The FHWA’s LCTM awards to 39 state DOTs provide a funding mechanism that, if connected to disaster recovery planning, could transform how we rebuild after climate events.
What remains missing is a broader shift in mindset: Seeing infrastructure decarbonization not as a niche technical upgrade, but as a social innovation imperative, one that requires the same kind of cross-sector coalition-building that SSIR’s readers apply to health, education, and poverty.
The cost of inaction is already visible. Hurricane Helene caused $9.8 billion in transportation infrastructure damage in a single state. Each rebuilding cycle adds emissions from cement and steel while the communities least equipped to absorb repeated shocks bear the greatest burden. If we continue to rebuild the same way, we entrench a cycle of fragility: high costs, high emissions, low resilience. Infrastructure should serve as a shield against climate disruption, not a recurring liability.
For leaders in the social sector, infrastructure offers a practical and powerful lever for innovation. Nonprofits can advocate for equity-centered procurement and accountability, as the BlueGreen Alliance has done in advancing Buy Clean policies across nine states. Philanthropy can de-risk pilots and enable coalitions to form, as funders have done through Cornell’s CR0WD Network and through the feasibility work undergirding NYCEDC’s circular guidelines. Governments can embed embodied carbon standards into public works, as California, New York, Colorado, and their peers are demonstrating, and use their convening power to align actors across project boundaries. Businesses can partner across sectors to scale proven approaches, as Skanska is doing under a Project Labor Agreement at SPARC and as structural engineering firms across North America are doing through their SE 2050 commitments.
Infrastructure has always been about connection: joining places, enabling movement, linking communities to opportunity. But it has also been, for too long, a system that locks in harm without asking whether the next bridge or tunnel could be built differently. The coalitions described here are beginning to ask that question. Their work is imperfect, incomplete, and often slower than the climate demands. But they exist, and they are growing. The question for the rest of us is whether we will join them before the concrete sets.
Read more stories by Prateek Srivastava.