Brief description of the organization
Caivan is one of Canada’s largest integrated land development, manufacturing, and homebuilding organizations and is active in the development of over fifty (50) communities across Ontario. Since inception, Caivan’s focus has been to lead the cyber-physical industrial revolution for the homebuilding sector, innovating in advanced manufacturing, automation and software engineering. This has resulted in significant investment in processes, people, and infrastructure, including a 105,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art manufacturing facility capable of producing 5-7 homes per day, per shift. The Caivan management team is the industry’s most diverse and is comprised of leaders in land use planning, architecture, building science, civil, mechanical, and software engineering, automation, data science and mechatronics. The organization leverages deep know-how and a solid track record to vertically integrate to eliminate obstacles and to efficiently overcome critical path constraints.
Problem area
Students will explore the current lack of big picture cost / benefit assessments of climate policy options as they relate to real-world benefits. Without full cost accounting, climate policies and mandates traditionally established by governing authorities may not necessarily be in the best interest of solving the climate change problem. For example, does a net zero home have an overall positive impact on mitigating climate change? Or should these additional costs be directed to novel power generating solutions, or regenerative agriculture to sequester carbon? Similarly, how will countries generate enough electricity to power the growth of electric vehicles? How will we mine the volume of raw materials required to support the manufacturing of batteries for electric vehicles?
Main objectives
The main objective of this project is for students to establish a framework for full cost accounting of climate policies and mandates. To prove their proposed framework is practical and can be implemented, it may be prudent to focus on a specific policy and complete a full cost accounting assessment using their proposed framework. Ultimately, this should either prove (or disprove) the overall net benefit of the policy.
Scope of work
Key steps would be investigating current climate policies, breaking down the broad impacts of these policies (full cost accounting), and building an economic model (calculation of net cost / benefit).
Deliverables
An explanation and summary of current climate policies with their broad impact would be helpful to define / scope this problem. From there, a proposed framework should be developed to understand the net cost / benefit of climate policies. Ultimate verification of the proposed framework would come in the form of a full-cost accounting economic model.
Team meeting frequency
Bi-weekly
Skills and training required
Researching, understanding of public policy, and economic / mathematical skills.
Resources required
- The team may need access to computing resources to run economic models as well as access to government policies / research papers.
- The intent is for this to be a macro / global problem. Therefore, the project team would look to our organization for guidance, but no specific research or datasets would be provided by Caivan.