PhD Thesis Presentation - Public Blockchain-based Carbon Management System: Supporting Upfront Embodied Carbon Reduction in the Construction Industry

Upfront embodied carbon (UEC) is a significant component of construction-related life-cycle emissions. However, its accounting, reporting, and potential market-based applications remain constrained by fragmented data flows, complex quantification processes, and reliance on manual procedures and centralised information systems. These limitations undermine data integrity, transparency, traceability, and privacy, increasing the risks of error, manipulation, and unreliable carbon records. Although blockchain has been proposed as a potential approach to improving carbon-data governance, existing research has remained predominantly conceptual or focused on basic functions, with insufficient attention to implementation and adoption. System evaluations have often concentrated on non-functional metrics while overlooking design objectives, user acceptance, practical applicability, and adoption conditions. Moreover, blockchain-enabled carbon trading research focuses mainly on operational emissions, with limited consideration of project-level UEC and the integration of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), registry, and trading functions.

This thesis addresses these gaps through four contributions. First, it designs and develops UECarbonChain, a public blockchain-based framework and prototype to enhance the reliability, transparency, traceability, and privacy of UEC accounting and reporting in construction supply chains. Second, it develops and applies a multidimensional evaluation framework to assess the technical and practical performance of UECarbonChain and provide an evidence-based basis for decisions regarding the adoption of public blockchain for UEC management in construction. Third, it extends UECarbonChain through a conceptual blockchain-enabled UEC trading framework integrating MRV, registry, and trading functions within a layered architecture. Fourth, it incorporates stakeholder engagement throughout the research to identify industry practices, implementation challenges, and user perspectives, thereby strengthening the practical relevance and industry alignment of the proposed system and frameworks. Overall, quantitative, qualitative, simulation-based, and prototype-based findings demonstrate the feasibility, effectiveness, and practical applicability of UECarbonChain and its registry-and-trading extension, improving the reliability of UEC accounting and supporting market mechanisms that incentivise and facilitate UEC reduction in the construction industry.