A carbon budget can feel like a hard wall in modern building design, and once you treat CO2 as currency, everything starts competing for a slice of it. The problem is that fire safety systems often show up in those spreadsheets only as a penalty: extra embodied carbon for sprinklers, alarms, and protection. What gets ignored is the payoff. A serious fire can erase years of “sustainable” choices through demolition, replacement materials, repair labor, and lost building value, all with a very r...