The “10 Whole Life Cycle Recommendations for the Buildings Breakthrough” are a list of consensus driven recommendations developed through extensive stakeholder engagement led by the Materials Hub (supported by the GlobalABC, One Planet Network and Life Cycle Initiative) and its two parallel working groups Whole Life Cycle Policy Coalition (WLCP.Co, led by the Department of Energy Security and Net-Zero from the UK and the WBCSD) and Circular Built Environment (CBE, led by the Ministry of the Environment of Finland and RMIT University). 

The recommendations will be launched at the Buildings and Climate Global Forum on 7 March, with the ambition to promote Whole Life Cycle (WLC) policy thinking on a global stage, and to raise awareness on the significance of addressing Whole Life Cycle emissions in implementing the Buildings Breakthrough objectives. This should help to progress towards the Paris Agreement through near-zero emissions and resilient buildings. 

The recommendations aim to:

• show how Whole Life Cycle considerations underpin the Buildings Breakthrough Key Priority Actions, and
• provide guidance to policy makers to implement the Buildings Breakthrough commitments nationally and locally.

The approach to deliver the recommendations was to:

• Highlight the work already being done: Compile and present existing initiatives and tools that employ WLC approaches that can be used by actors along the value chains of buildings and construction.
• Identify the gaps where further tools and investment might be needed.
• Diversify the voices producing guidance on Whole Life Cycle impacts, and produce recommendations following a large international engagement effort, and encourage practices that promote both environmental and social well-being.
• Link the approach to a circular economy and sufficiency in the buildings and construction sector to a whole life cycle perspective, and introduce the avoid-shift-improve framework.

The “10 Recommendations”

Recommendation 1: Definition of Near Zero Emissions and Resilient Buildings

Develop and adopt policies to deliver Near Zero Emissions Buildings through the use of Life Cycle Assessments, and ensure international alignment and harmonisation on the definitions of Near Zero Emissions and Resilient Buildings considering nuances of local context.

• Harmonising the definitions for near-zero emissions and resilient buildings can allow for comparison and accountability of actors when designed to work for new and existing assets. This should be internationally agreed to ensure alignment between countries with a reasonable balance stuck between prescriptive standards and globally flexible standards. The alignment of nomenclature as well as the use of unified definitions and indicators should be adopted in policy with international stakeholders in mind to simplify standards and assessments. International alignment must be nuanced and undertaken with a view to being representative across nations and be flexible enough to account for regional disparities. 
• Accurate measurement of emissions is required to achieve Near Zero Emissions Buildings. Policies should be adopted which require Life Cycle Assessments, with a focus on Greenhouse Gas Emissions as the impact factor in a first stage. Governments should also move towards giving additional consideration to other indicators such as biodiversity and circularity when decision making. Costs and skills will need to be taken into account as they represent a significant barrier to progress. High quality data and international benchmarks can remove barriers to producing lower cost, faster assessments, thereby growing international capacity. 
• Resilience to climate change is a key requirement for a building stock fit for purpose in 2030. The changing requirements of buildings need to be considered when developing targets for near zero emission buildings to include resilience to extreme weather conditions and the ability to secure healthy indoor comfort levels in the face of rising external temperatures and heatwaves, without extreme energy use. Further adaptation to climate change should be considered when developing global principles for Near Zero Emission and Resilient Buildings through the Buildings Breakthrough.

Recommendation 2: Alignment of Whole Life Carbon Standards

Develop and align universal principles and standards to enable more consistent, transparent, and comparable methodologies and frameworks to assess and report Whole Life Carbon and, in future, the broader sustainability performance of buildings.

• Consistency in assessing Whole Life Carbon is essential to obtain accurate data and reduce emissions to Paris-aligned targets. National methodologies and frameworks should be developed based on international collaboration to ensure comparable outcomes. Both private and public whole life cycle initiatives are rising, creating emerging expertise but also potential for effort duplication, confusion, and at times a lack of clarity in what is being assessed. However, this growing expertise presents a valuable opportunity for accelerating whole life carbon policy if it can be coordinated and given direction towards shared principles and common standards.
• Shared principles and international standards are required to address increasing concern on environmental and social impacts of human activities. Additionally, the nature and equity emergency need to be addressed in line with the climate emergency. Similarly to Whole Life Carbon, principles and standards should be developed to assess and report consistent, transparent and comparable Life Cycle Sustainability Assessments, under a universal alignment. Doing both in parallel enables governments to generate the synergies essential to tackling environmental and social impacts from a systemic view; avoiding the creation of silos which can prevent meaningful change.  
• Harmonisation of Methodologies and Tools are important to allow for in-depth comparison and dialogue between countries, including a timeline and a staged approach for different countries. This can be done through international collaboration and developing open source tools with agreed methodology with in-built accessibility for less technical audiences. This should be accompanied by capacity building and training for necessary stakeholders.  Life Cycle Assessments are a foundational tool in addressing building impacts and should be incorporated into government approaches accordingly. The high cost of some standards or tools needs to be addressed and the costs and benefits of these clearly outlined for the public.

Recommendation 3:  Accessible and High-Quality Data 

Support global initiatives to establish and share open source environmental and social data on resource use and buildings to enable accessible, full scope Life Cycle Sustainability Assessments and better inform associated decision making. 

• High quality data is essential to enabling robust and transparent decision-making in the face of increasing risk and uncertainties. Leaders of public and private institutions should recognize the value of publicly available, disaggregated data.  Governments should provide support to develop local databases to improve the environmental performance of local industries as well as push to align local, national and international standards and databases wherever feasible. Accordingly, policymakers should incentivise the tracking and reporting of high-quality data through schemes, such as tax credits and climate change agreements. Expanding the tracking of data further along the supply chain could require incentives such as grants or penalties or cost uplifts. Governments and industry would both benefit from improved access to high-quality data which can inform science-based decision making for reducing resources use and whole life cycle sustainability performance of buildings and building stocks.
• The development of consistent data standards such as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data is essential to understand real environmental and social impacts across the whole life cycle of buildings and set realistic targets. Policy makers and institutions should actively support the establishment and operation of platforms where data is collected and shared publicly following FAIR data principles. Governments should work to agree on these standards and integrate them into general practice where possible. Governments and industry would need to work towards removing barriers to data sharing to make common standard setting easier. 
• Open-source life cycle data initiatives can enable streamlined collaboration between policy, research and industry stakeholders, increase innovation and reduce the resource demand associated with their development and maintenance. By facilitating increased data collaboration between stakeholders through open licensing and joint management of decentralised data, policy makers can increase data security and improve accessibility. Governments can further remove barriers for accessing and using data relevant to the assessment of resource use and environmental impacts of construction products and buildings, by providing incentives to share the data publicly without affecting commercial interests. In some cases, the necessary data on construction products and buildings is already collected by government agencies and industry bodies but not retained or made available; the benefits of making that data available represent a significant potential return for minimal investment.   

Recommendation 4: Benchmarks for Building Emissions

Develop voluntary benchmarks for whole life cycle environmental impacts of buildings, with a clear and binding pathway towards making them mandatory.

• Developing context-based voluntary benchmarks is important to ensure a clear pathway for target development that considers the impact of regional conditions. By developing accessible voluntary benchmarks with defined escalating targets to meet over time, governments can establish a clear pathway to near-zero in the building sector. Benchmarks should be based on current market practice and projected future needs to provide a clear direction of travel. These should be accompanied by the open-source tools, capacity building and training required for stakeholders to understand and meet the benchmarks. By enhancing awareness and providing support, governments can enhance the capability of industry to meet targets. Concurrently, political will should be harnessed to move towards making these targets mandatory overtime. Conflation of existing standards could present a barrier to the development of new standards, causing potential confusion, if they are not considered in the design of benchmarks. 
• Collaboration between countries is important when developing and delivering benchmarks in order to establish a country and regional specific timeline and staged approach. This staged approach can take into consideration the different levers that are effective in different countries based on their context. This can be supported through promotion of government/industry alliances to enhance local understanding and collaboration.  Aligning these internationally, presents an opportunity to remove significant barriers to new policy and international collaboration taking into account trade-offs in place-based approaches. 
• Representative and reliable data will be essential to appropriate target setting when deploying benchmarks. Producing a representative set of LCA’s on buildings conducted in each of the countries/region and varying local context. Develop country specific life databases that include primary data from the construction industry of that country, as it would highlight the environmental performance improvement efforts in different industries in the respective country. Through monitoring and evaluating the real-life performance of the buildings to ensure that they meet the benchmarks. There are potential increases to the cost of data collection, especially where more targets are needed. Highly fragmented value chain of buildings and construction are a barrier to consistent standard setting. 

 Recommendation 5: Interoperable product standards

Require interoperability of standards for accounting environmental impacts of materials and products using consistent metrics across global and regional markets to ensure performance-based decisions on materials use.

• Material neutrality and comparability is important, so that Life cycle assessments can be used to make the optimal material choice to reduce overall emissions.  Governments should support initiatives through funding that drives interoperability of emissions accounting standards for different materials, particularly steel, cement, aluminium, insulation, glass and timber. For traditional and local materials where there are no existing standards, governments should aim to develop high-level guidance on emissions assessments. 
• Products containing reused or recycled materials will become increasingly common in a circular economy. Policymakers should ensure circularity is considered in national standards for product emissions and raise this with standard developers. Keeping track of the carbon footprint of waste or re-used products can be achieved by prioritising open and transparent standards.
• Certification of low carbon materials is essential to ensure methodological consistency in carbon accounting. Demand for verified standards should be prioritised through procurement guidelines, legislation or incentives. Where possible alignment should be sought on global material and product verification / certification. Certification may vary depending on the local setting, and common principles should be followed such as using a third party and providing minimum information. 

Recommendation 6: Common language and Diverse Contexts

To identify and leverage opportunities for mutual actions to decarbonize buildings, join global networks and facilitate further exchange between international stakeholders to identify commonalities and acknowledge different needs within a diverse global context. 

• Common Understanding, information sharing and alignment on definitions for “Green”, “lean” or “near-zero” used in different countries is essential to making near-zero buildings the new normal for 2030. Governments should support initiatives that develop a common lexicon for near-zero buildings suitable for different regional contexts and construction practices. They should also incentivise developing and emerging economies to participate by providing funding to travel, ensuring equal opportunity for engagement and learning. Platforms such as the Buildings Breakthrough could be used to disseminate this common lexicon. Though the international engagement required to achieve this will be significant and require some compromise it should act to streamline future collaboration and joint initiatives.
• Developing understanding of the variety in international construction practices, including both traditional and cutting-edge high-tech approaches, is key to facilitating international cooperation and cross compatibility of practices. By supporting investment in research to develop case studies, governments can better understand the Whole Life Carbon of different typologies of buildings, identify low carbon construction practices and materials in each country or region, and contribute these to a global database. This Improved visibility of regional differences can accelerate the uptake of best practice in government and industry. Better understanding could allow for increased parity in standards reducing barriers to technology exchange and trade. 

Recommendation 7: Drive investment

Drive investment into near-zero buildings by developing and championing policies that increase the market demand for low carbon solutions and near zero buildings, and by leading by example with Whole Life Carbon requirements in public procurements. 

• Promoting international collaboration for financing of near zero buildings is a powerful tool in driving greater investment. This can be done by adopting a common taxonomy which recognises the long-term economic benefits gained from near-zero buildings and developing public-private partnerships to invest in near-zero buildings and evaluate their success. Governments have an opportunity to lead by example by requiring new standards and assessments on public projects; this can also act as an effective testing ground for further improvement of developing practices. 
• Evaluation Tools to evaluate the long-term cost and environmental impact of public procurement are essential to furthering investment. By Introducing green procurement frameworks which require Whole Life Carbon assessments of new buildings and retrofits, governments can increase the availability of data. These tools need to be designed to incentivise demand for low carbon solutions while prioritising performance. 
• Evaluating informal construction is a key barrier that needs to be overcome in order to better understand the environmental impacts of the building sector.  It is currently more difficult to evaluate the environmental impact of informal construction and this needs to be addressed in policy and regulation. By developing strong ties between local and national governments actors can increase their capacity to understand the extent, typology and impact of local construction, and develop policies to reduce their environmental footprint. Governments should initially prioritise quick win opportunities which will differ based on the local context.

Recommendation 8: Prioritise Retrofitting

Value the extension of the life of the existing building stock and building retrofit to serve changing needs through data collection and monitoring, policies, guidelines, capacity building and economic incentives, as long as it maintains or improves efficiency and reduces life cycle emissions. 

• Develop policy and guidelines to allow flexible use of existing spaces for different purposes. Through planning instruments, regulation and guidelines designed to support data transparency, the mapping of vacant spaces in the building stock and the identification of opportunities for alternate use of existing building stock, governments can build capacity to extend the life of buildings and improve operational flexibility. Policies and capacity building can support incremental construction including temporary use of buildings, renovation, refurbishment, flexible conversions, infill, and extensions of existing buildings, extending building uses while maintaining or adding value.
• Strengthened Data is key to supporting technical solutions and easing the complexity of retrofitting. Government should develop ways to measure vacancy rates to maximise occupancy and have clear pathways to move towards requiring deconstruction audits and life-cycle assessments of buildings to better understand a building’s capacity to reuse construction materials, products, components, and appliances. This data can enable existing buildings to be accurately valued.
• Economic incentives can support refurbishment over new construction where it maintains or improves efficiency and performance of buildings. Through the design and implementation of economic incentives for sensible retrofitting over building new, governments can create a clear business case for industry to re-utilise existing stock. Properly deployed economic incentives can strengthen the case for maximising occupancy and retrofitting to help realise the potential value of the existing building stock.  

Recommendation 9: Material Circularity

Promote circularity and the use of sustainable circular building materials, components, products and appliances when constructing, dismantling, renovating or refurbishing buildings, through data transparency and accessibility, policy tools and market instruments. 

• Data transparency and accessibility for key building materials, components, products, and appliances can empower decision makers across the value chain to better assess the potential benefits and impacts of choices. This can be done through the use of pre-demolition audits, material passports, certification, standards, and regulation supporting the environmental performance of new buildings and future reuse of deconstructed buildings. Easy access to data can enable performance-based decision making and empower the reuse of building materials, products, components, and appliances over multiple lives.
• Standards, regulations, and policies can enable the pathways necessary for the utilisation of circular and sustainable materials. This includes addressing certification requirements of materials, empowering sustainable manufacturers through low carbon regulation and industrial symbiosis on production and developing standards and frameworks for promoting sustainable procurement and safe and non-toxic material re-use. These measures can address source emissions through supply side measures and resource efficiency, thereby extending producer responsibility to promote closed loops and recovery of raw materials. However, international engagement is needed to align standards and ensure the fundamental pathways for the buildings and construction sector are streamlined. 
• Developing market instruments can support market readiness and establishment of secondary markets to promote reused building materials, products, components, and appliances. Government can lead by example to support the development of market instruments for the creation of secondary markets to balance supply and demand. Finance, fiscal incentives and capacity building can support the development of secondary markets.

Recommendation 10: Design for Circularity

Promote long service life of new buildings, through spatial planning and design requirements addressing building circularity, material efficiency and data transparency, to reduce resource use and whole life cycle emissions.

• Design and planning can promote long service life of new buildings and construction. Flexibility for multiple uses, lightweight design, easy retrofitting, optimised use of space and designing for disassembly can deliver material efficiency and circular buildings. Whilst designing in such a way buildings must also consider emissions performance as a priority. Capacity building, transparency of data, policy, tools, and incentives should be used to retain embodied carbon in new buildings.
• Data underpinning monitoring and evaluation can inform changing design and operational needs, and improve material use efficiency. Life Cycle Assessments at the outset of planning and design for new buildings combined with material passports support decisions for future reuse of materials, products, components, and appliances. The current lack of data complicates the reuse of materials and prevents informed decision making. 

Get involved

• Join the Materials Hub and its working groups by filling out this form. 
• Share your experiences implementing actions relevant to the 10 WLC recommended actions.