Francesco Pomponi

Francesco Pomponi is a professional engineer who worked several years in the construction industry prior to returning to academia in 2012. He holds a BEng in Industrial Engineering, an MSc in Engineering Management and a PhD in Civil Engineering and Built Environment.

Francesco has been a Visiting Researcher in the School of Management of Cranfield University and a visiting PhD student at the Federal University of Viçosa in Brazil, Department of Architecture and Urbanism. He’s worked on research funded by the EPSRC and Innovate UK, as well as the Isaac Newton Trust.

He currently holds an EPSRC grant to investigate the embodied carbon of building structures and research focuses on life cycle assessment, circular economy, and measurement, management and mitigation of the impacts of the built environment on the natural environment.

Eiffel Tower La Defense district in Paris

Cities and climate change: why low-rise buildings are the future – not skyscrapers

Our recent study, which examined whether building denser and taller is the right path to sustainability, busts this myth: we found that densely built, low-rise environments are more space and carbon efficient, while high-rise buildings have a drastically higher carbon impact.

October 28, 2021

So Much for COP23 – There’s a Whole Class of Carbon Emissions we’re Totally Ignoring

We sometimes refer to the emissions while a building is functioning as the operational carbon, and all the other emissions across its life cycle as the embodied carbon. Focusing on one and not the other is puzzling to say the least – we’re effectively trying to take the carbon out of our energy bills while paying no attention to the carbon in the buildings themselves.

November 15, 2017