This guidance is primarily aimed at public procurers involved in a range of contracting agreements related to building materials and products. This includes the purchase of building materials for construction works, but may also extend to material extraction, manufacturing, building, retrofit, refurbishment, design, interior fit out, and end-of-life demolition or deconstruction processes. 

Some Finnish buildings could cut their carbon footprints by as much as 43% – according to research conducted by One Click LCA for the Finnish government – and almost all could make a saving of 28% using easily available decarbonisation strategies.

EDGE (“Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiencies”) is a free software, a green building standard, and an international green building certification system, enabling users to design and certify resource-efficient and zero carbon buildings. 

Urban cooling is a recent subject and the knowledge produced by research and the first experiments give various results, sometimes difficult to decipher for operational actors.

This guide offers a synthetic, multi-criteria and operational approach to emerging or proven solutions, adapted to different climatic and urban contexts. It is a question of clarifying the decision of the public and private actors, as well on their choices of installation, construction, renovation of the buildings as of installation of the external spaces.