At the end of May 2022, WorldGBC launched an EU Policy Whole Life Carbon Roadmap for the built environment.

In this series of blogs from WorldGBC, we are going to look at how we developed the Roadmap, at our vision for a decarbonised built environment and how to get there. We’ll be speaking to some of the people who were involved in the process along the way to get their insights on how this Roadmap can catalyse political action and the steps we can all take to support its implementation.

In this second instalment, Zsolt Toth, Team Leader at Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE), explores the role of Building Regulations in decarbonising the EU’s built environment.

Why does building regulation matter?

The EU’s ultimate goal is to achieve a highly energy efficient and decarbonised building stock by 2050, in line with the EU Green Deal’s goal of climate neutrality across the bloc by the same year.

In light of this, updating building regulations at the EU level to tackle the full environmental impact of the built environment is a crucial way to mandate low-carbon construction for new builds and renovation. These regulations dictate the standards to which buildings must be constructed and renovated across Member States as well as what data must be reported.

Policy efforts to decarbonise Europe’s building stock have until now primarily focused on energy efficiency and measures to decarbonise heating and cooling.

This focus on energy efficiency is important, and more must be done to address this as the operational carbon of buildings is still considerable. However, embodied carbon in buildings, i.e. all emissions associated with materials and construction processes, needs to be tackled soon to avoid undermining the carbon reductions achieved from the energy saving measures.

To address these other emissions, EU policymakers will need to mandate the methodology for reporting the embodied carbon of the manufacturing, transportation, construction, renovation and end-of-life phases of built assets, and then go further by setting targets to reduce it.

Which building regulations need to be addressed?

The main directive that we looked at as part of the development of the Roadmap is the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). This is particularly relevant at present as it is under review as part of the Fit for 55 package, which is designed to help deliver the EU’s intermediary climate target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030.

Read the full article here.