Why Carbon Tracking is Broken and How Digital Twins Are Fixing It

Tackling climate change demands more than energy-efficient buildings. To make a measurable impact, we must account for total carbon emissions – not just the operational emissions from daily energy use, but also the embodied carbon locked into the materials and construction processes of our built environment. Studies have shown that buildings account for roughly 40% of global CO₂ emissions, and nearly half of all emissions from new construction between now and 2050 will come from embodied carbon in materials. In other words, the concrete, steel, glass, and other materials we choose (and how we build with them) can contribute as much carbon as decades of heating or cooling a building. For building owners and institutions committed to climate goals, the question is no longer if we should measure carbon across the entire building lifecycle, but how to do it accurately, continuously, and at scale.

The challenge? Data fragmentation. In practice, the information needed to track total carbon is scattered across different systems and teams. Design and engineering teams work in BIM (Building Information Modeling) software. Construction contractors use their own field management and procurement tools. Facility managers rely on BMS (Building Management Systems) and energy dashboards to monitor operations. Meanwhile, sustainability and ESG teams often end up buried in spreadsheets, manually aggregating data for emissions reporting and compliance. These disconnected silos make it difficult to answer a fundamental question: Are we truly designing, building, and operating sustainably? When data lives in separate pockets, it’s nearly impossible to get a holistic view of a building’s carbon footprint over its entire life. Critical information falls through the cracks, and sustainability efforts become reactive, responding to issues after the fact, rather than proactive and strategic.

Connecting the Dots with a Lifecycle Digital Twin

What if all those fragmented data sources could be linked together into one living system? This is the promise of the lifecycle digital twin. A lifecycle digital twin is more than just a static 3D model on a screen. It’s a continuously evolving, data-rich digital replica of a building that spans the building’s entire lifecycle, from initial design and construction to commissioning, operations, and even major renovations or renewal. In essence, it serves as a “single source of truth” for all building data across phases, creating a bridge between traditionally isolated stages.

Platforms like TwinWorX (developed by e-Magic) enable this transformation by acting as a unified data layer that connects everything together, BIM design files, construction records, IoT sensor streams, asset databases, and sustainability metrics, into one integrated whole. The digital twin centralizes and contextualizes data that was once siloed, providing both holistic and granular visibility into the information that matters. For example, TwinWorX can integrate real-time facility telemetry data (temperatures, airflow, energy use, equipment status, etc.) into a 3D virtual model of the building, allowing users to monitor and visualize operations in context. The result is a carbon-aware, performance-optimized portfolio of facilities that can be monitored, analyzed, and improved over time as conditions change. Instead of static reports or disjointed dashboards, stakeholders get a dynamic “living” model of their building’s performance, including its carbon performance, at their fingertips.

Crucially, a lifecycle digital twin isn’t just about visualization; it’s about connecting the dots between design intentions, construction realities, and operational outcomes. By fusing previously isolated data, it enables informed decisions at every step: architects can see how their material choices impact future operations, engineers and contractors can hand over richer information to owners, and facility managers can feed operational data back into renovation or retrofit plans. This continuous feedback loop is what turns sustainability from a one-time effort (like a design-stage energy model or a post-occupancy report) into an ongoing, actively managed aspect of a building’s life.

One Platform to Track Carbon at Every Stage

With a lifecycle digital twin in place, sustainability data is no longer locked away in silos. All relevant information is captured, connected, and contextualized in one platform at every phase of the building’s lifecycle. Let’s break down how this plays out across the key stages:

• Design & Procurement: Early design decisions determine much of a building’s eventual carbon footprint, especially when it comes to embodied carbon in materials. A digital twin can link material specifications directly to Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) – standardized documents that report a product’s environmental impact and carbon intensity. This gives designers and engineers immediate feedback on the carbon implications of their choices. Teams can also run early-stage embodied carbon models using tools like the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), which helps compare materials and identify lower-carbon options during design. By integrating EC3 data and other LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) results into the twin, stakeholders can virtually test “what-if” scenarios, for example, comparing the impact of using recycled steel vs. virgin steel, or low-carbon concrete mixes, before construction begins. This stage is all about validation and smart substitution: ensuring that the project selects building materials and designs that align with climate goals from the outset. In short, the digital twin enables the project team to validate low-carbon options up front, reducing the need for costly changes later and setting the foundation for a sustainable building before a single shovel hits the ground.

• Construction & Commissioning: During construction, a massive amount of data is generated about what actually goes into the building, the specific products, quantities, and processes. A lifecycle twin captures this information to track as-built embodied carbon in real time. Every installed material can be logged with its actual carbon profile or GWP (Global Warming Potential) value, creating a living inventory of the building’s embodied carbon as construction progresses. This makes it possible to verify whether the project is meeting its embodied carbon targets and to flag any deviations (for instance, if a higher-emission material was substituted on site, the twin would reflect that). When the building is commissioned and handed over, the digital twin serves as an audit-ready digital record of the project, far more comprehensive than a stack of paper binders. All the asset data, equipment specifications, O&M manuals, and sustainability documentation are organized within the twin, which smooths the transition to operations. Importantly, this approach aligns with emerging regulations and green building standards. Governments are introducing “Buy Clean” policies that require documentation of materials’ carbon footprints, for example, California’s Buy Clean Act mandates EPDs for certain materials on state projects. Likewise, certifications like LEED are now awarding points for using lower-carbon materials and conducting whole-building lifecycle assessments. By tracking materials and their GWP in one place, TwinWorX helps project teams comply with these requirements effortlessly, ensuring that from day one, the building is delivered with sustainability metrics in check and documentation to prove it.

• Operations & Maintenance: Once the building is occupied and operational, the digital twin truly comes to life. It continuously monitors real-time performance data – energy consumption, water usage, indoor environmental quality, equipment status, emissions from onsite fuel use, and more – through IoT sensors and the building management systems. Instead of separate energy dashboards or monthly reports, facility managers can see live data in the twin and understand it in context (e.g. which HVAC unit is consuming the most power, or how occupancy levels are affecting heating demand). This holistic view enables optimizing operational carbon on a continuous basis. For instance, operators can identify anomalies or inefficiencies immediately and take action to reduce energy waste, thereby cutting emissions. Moreover, the twin’s analytics can recommend or simulate improvements: if a particular chiller or boiler is underperforming, the system might highlight it for retrofit with a newer, efficient model that has a lower GWP refrigerant. Replacing high-impact systems with lower-GWP or more efficient alternatives becomes a data-driven decision, guided by the twin’s insights. Additionally, a lifecycle twin platform like TwinWorX supports predictive maintenance, it uses real-time and historical data to predict equipment failures or degradation before they happen. By catching issues early, owners can extend asset life and avoid the carbon and cost impact of premature replacements. This not only reduces downtime and maintenance costs, but also contributes to sustainability by getting the maximum useful life out of each asset (thereby deferring the need for new equipment manufacture and installation, which carry their own carbon impacts). In short, during operations, the digital twin turns data into action: it’s like having a 24/7 sustainability advisor and facilities engineer keeping watch over the building’s performance.

• ESG Reporting & Strategic Planning: On the corporate side, a lifecycle digital twin simplifies and strengthens sustainability reporting. Instead of ESG teams scrambling to collect data from various departments and spreadsheets, much of the needed information is automatically aggregated in the twin. The platform can calculate and consolidate key performance indicators (KPIs) from annual operational emissions to water savings to waste reduction, across not just one building but an entire portfolio. This makes it far easier to generate disclosures for frameworks like LEED, WELL, or GRESB, and to track progress toward carbon neutrality or other goals. For example, if an organization is pursuing a LEED certification or a net-zero carbon commitment, the twin can provide the evidence (energy readings, renewable energy contributions, embodied carbon counts) without a special manual effort each time. Reporting that used to take weeks of data gathering can be largely automated. Moreover, having all this data in one place builds transparency and trust: facility managers and executives alike can drill down into the numbers, confident that they’re looking at consistent, up-to-date information. Beyond compliance, the digital twin serves as a strategic planning tool – executives and capital planners can analyze trends across their buildings to decide where to invest for the biggest sustainability returns. Should they retrofit Building A before Building B? Which facilities are lagging on performance? By consolidating these insights, the twin elevates sustainability from a checkbox compliance exercise to a core part of business strategy.

Why It Matters in Practice

Legacy approaches to managing building sustainability are often backward-looking and piecemeal. Traditional systems generate static reports that tell you what happened last month or last year, and compliance checks are done after issues have occurred (“reactive” mode). With data fragmented, even the best-intentioned sustainability programs struggle to move the needle because decisions aren’t informed by a complete, real-time picture. In contrast, a platform like TwinWorX delivers a dynamic, integrated view, a continuously updated digital twin, that enables informed, proactive decisions across every phase of a building’s life. This fundamentally changes the game from reactive troubleshooting to ongoing optimization.

For organizations pursuing aggressive climate goals, commitments to carbon neutrality, or simply looking to make smarter long-term investments, a lifecycle digital twin makes sustainability measurable and manageable. It brings what could be abstract concepts (like “embodied carbon” or “indoor environmental quality”) down to earth by tying them to live data and day-to-day workflows. Sustainability is no longer just a lofty ideal or annual report metric, it becomes something teams can track and improve in real time, backed by data. Facility managers benefit from clear insights that help them run buildings more efficiently, predict and prevent problems, and justify upgrades. Business leaders gain a portfolio-wide perspective to guide decisions and demonstrate accountability to stakeholders and regulators.

In essence, if you’re designing for performance and building for resilience, the lifecycle digital twin is the foundation that ties it all together. It ensures that every stakeholder, from the architects to the on-site engineers to the operators and the C-suite, is working off the same playbook of data toward the same sustainability objectives. By connecting design, construction, and operations in one digital thread, we can finally break down the silos that have long hindered true sustainability in the built environment. The end result is not just greener buildings in theory, but tangible, provable reductions in carbon footprint and improvements in performance in practice. And as climate pressures and regulations continue to mount, this approach isn’t just nice-to-have, it’s rapidly becoming an essential strategy for future-proofing our facilities and portfolios.

In the journey to net zero and beyond, lifecycle digital twins like TwinWorX are turning vision into action, one building at a time. They empower us to answer with confidence the once-elusive question: Yes, we are building and operating sustainably.