This document was elaborated by the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance (CNCA) and Culmer Raphael under the project "Dramatically Reducing Embodied Carbon in Europe's Built Environment", which CNCA launched in 2021 with the support of the Laudes Foundation. The purpose of this document is to serve as a communications material that city staff can resort to when raising awareness of the importance of addressing embodied carbon and increasing the uptake of bio-based materials among their city-department peers.

The current Commission proposal does not go far enough in addressing operational and embodied carbon emissions on building lifecycle global warming potential (lifecycle-GWP), often referred to as Whole Life Carbon (WLC). Deploying WLC measures in the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) recast will be a win-win for energy performance and climate action at the building and industry level. Therefore, a stepwise approach and a clear timeline that go beyond 2030 needs to be set out in the EPBD recast.

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of cement. The industry accounts for 13 percent of the country’s total carbon emissions, making it the third largest-emitting industry after power and steel.

In this report, RMI provides a roadmap for how the US federal government can reduce embodied carbon emissions from public building projects over the next 30 years and outlines strategies for agencies to facilitate the broader movement to decarbonize the building industry and industrial supply chains. The core strategies underpinning the roadmap to zero embodied carbon by 2050 are:

The Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction (Buildings-GSR) is a flagship publication of the UNEP-hosted Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC). The Buildings-GSR provides an annual snapshot of the progress of the buildings and construction sector on a global scale and reviews the status of policies, finance, technologies, and solutions to monitor whether the sector is aligned with the Paris Agreement goals. It also provides stakeholders with evidence to persuade policymakers and the overall buildings and construction community to take action.

This report - Sri Lanka Roadmap for Sustainable Housing and Construction 2020 – 2050 - presents the findings of the Sustainable Building Construction Country Assessment for Sri Lanka (SBC-CA) and a Roadmap for Sustainable Housing and Construction and achieving NDCs in the construction industry in Sri Lanka. It examines the current status, and potential opportunities and challenges for adopting Sustainable Building Construction (SBC) practices and policies.

With the built environment responsible for almost 40% of energy-related carbon emissions globally, we must find new ways to design and construct our cities.  

Reuse of materials is a key principle within a circular economy, ensuring material value is maintained for as long as possible. Use of reclaimed materials in construction has the potential to reduce the embodied carbon of construction, minimising the need for virgin material extraction and production as well as reducing volumes of waste generated and other negative externalities.

In Senegal, the construction sector is booming. Today, concrete is used widely in construction sites but although it is produced locally and inexpensively, it is highly polluting. However, architects such as Worofila Architecture want to build differently, inspired by the raw earth houses of yesteryear and bringing local know-how back to life. These methods can greatly reduce the impacts of concrete building, whilst producing attractive buildings with excellent thermal performance.

Cement is responsible for 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is predicted to grow with increasing development. The majority is used in concrete, globally the most common material in buildings. Reducing emissions from the use of cement and concrete in buildings is therefore critical in order to limit global warming. However there remain multiple gaps in knowledge about the extent of these emissions.

ResponsibleSteel™ is the steel industry’s first global multi-stakeholder standard and certification initiative. As a not-forprofit multi-stakeholder organisation, it has been founded to bring together business, civil society and downstream users of steel, to provide a global standard and certification initiative for steel. Standard development seeks to build consensus on what sustainability looks like for steel – including the impacts of mining, steel production, the scrap metal supply chain, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, workers’ rights, communities and biodiversity.