Reference Lines

EC3 supports multiple types of reference lines for each category and search.

CLF Baselines

One of these reference lines can be the CLF Baseline for a specific year. These baselines are not a Building Transparency product, so you need to visit the CLF resources to learn about the details. However, we do our best to implement the Baselines in our tools and land many questions about using them, so here is a brief outline of a few things to know.

Varying CLF Baseline Methodologies

CLF Baselines have changed their underlying methodology with the 2023 version. This was described in CLF's own methodology document, however, Building Transparency receives questions from users who look for an explanation behind the drastic differences in their reduction claims using the new baseline values.

Anyone setting carbon reduction targets using the new 2023 Baselines will need to adjust their reduction expectations to be much lower, typically by roughly 30% (i.e., 30% reduction with 2021 CLF Baseline becomes a 0% reduction with 2023 CLF Baseline). In an ideal example scenario like shown below, where the GWP statistics across the three time periods don’t change and are evenly distributed, the difference in the baseline values is an adjustment from the 80th percentile to the 50th percentile (more accurately, the change has been to use Industry EPD average values).

You can read more about the way EC3 statistics work here.

Difference between EC3 statistics and different versions of CLF Baselines.

Another outcome of switching to only Industry EPDs for determining CLF Baselines is that some categories that previously had CLF Baselines now don't have them, because not all categories have Industry EPDs.

If you are pursuing the LEED Pilot Credit on Procurement of Low Carbon Construction Materials you are safe for now with the use of 2021 CLF Baselines, however, the deviation of LEED and CLF product category lists may become an issue in the future.

Specificity of Search Terms

Another change stemming from CLF Baselines methodology changing to follow individual, specific Industry EPD values is that the definitions of the product categories is much narrower. This means that you won’t get a CLF Baseline in EC3 unless you specify the exact specification of a product category in the CLF Baseline list. For example, you will have to refine your gypsum board EC3 search terms to cover and align with all of the CLF Baseline product specifications, like fire rating and thickness, as shown below.

Specifying search terms that match 2023 CLF Baselines.

Template Project & Search Collections

To make the search term definition a bit easier, we put together a template 2023 CLF Baseline Project available under the “Public” Buildings section in EC3 which has all of the implemented 2023 CLF Baselines listed together with their search collections defined. If you start with our template project (by copying it as your own), you will be able to copy and paste the collection definitions into other elements.

Copying template project search collections.

If you want to use the template search collections in your own existing projects, you can also copy the template project, remove any unnecessary elements, and then import the shortlist of elements into your actual project by following the steps below. The copy-paste process is the same as outlined earlier.

Importing template project search collections.

Implemented 2023 CLF Baselines

EC3’s Baselines are auto-populated based on the category and search terms. Unfortunately, geographically-specific baselines are more difficult to implement, therefore any region-specific concrete baselines are not yet available in EC3 at the time of this writing. The following are the implemented baselines in EC3.