Climate Action Roadmaps for Buildings and Construction Bangladesh has been launched by the Ministry of Housing and Public Works, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, on 7 October.

This roadmap follows the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC) framework, developed through a partnership between the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS). It emphasizes reducing emissions and improving resilience across the entire life cycle of buildings, and sets ambitious short-, medium-, and long-term targets for decarbonizing the built environment, aligned with the Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action. The roadmap is centred around four main cross-cutting objectives: (1) zero embodied carbon; (2) zero operational carbon; (3) adaptation; and (4) well-being and inclusion.

Download the roadmap below

Since its launch at COP 26, the Breakthrough Agenda has become established as an annual collaborative process centred around the Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is currently supported by 59 countries representing over 80% of global GDP, and by over 100 initiatives working to enhance collaboration within major emitting sectors. Countries can endorse Breakthrough goals to make clean technologies and sustainable practices more affordable, accessible and attractive than their alternatives by 2030 in the power, road transport, hydrogen, steel, cement, buildings and agriculture sectors. This report covers six of the seven sectors, with agricultural covered in a separate report.

The Breakthrough Agenda establishes an annual cycle to track developments towards these goals, identify where further coordinated international action is urgently needed to accelerate progress and then galvanise public and private international action behind these specific priorities in order to make these transitions quicker, cheaper, and easier for all.

To initiate this cycle, world leaders tasked the IEA and the UN Climate Change High Level Champions to develop an annual Breakthrough Agenda report to provide an independent evidence base and expert recommendations for where stronger international collaboration is needed.

This document, the 2024 Breakthrough Agenda Report, is the third of these annual reports. It provides an assessment of progress against the recommendations made last year, updating recommendations for what more needs to be done.

This year's report includes the second edition of the Buildings Chapter, developed in collaboration with the GlobalABC. The chapter highlights progress in the built environment and calls on governments to strengthen collaboration, in five priority areas: standards & certification, demand creation,  finance & investment, research & deployment, capacity & skills– to accelerate decarbonisation and enhance resilience in buildings. 

Download the report here

The new Finnish Construction Act includes obligations concerning sustainable construction that stress carbon reduction and longevity of buildings. The latter contains a new essential technical requirement concerning the lifecycle performance of a building. The lifecycle performance comprises durability, adaptability and reusability. Thus they also have impacts on the use value and economic value of buildings.

The basic condition for the management of lifecycle performance is that in construction projects precise and verifiable requirements can be set for lifecycle performance. This in turn requires that the lifecycle performance and indicators for them have been defined. The Ministry of the Environment started an expert process in 2022 that aims to further specify the concepts related to lifecycle performance and present a summary and development proposals for the evaluation, planning and guidelines concerning lifecycle performance.

This report presents some of the content produced in the expert process and proposes that, after having been further specified, lifecycle performance should be more systematically incorporated into the procurements and guidance of construction. The report lays the foundation for a systematic approach to lifecycle planning and gives recommendations for further development opportunities related to the topic.

Download the report here

Buildings and construction not only contribute to climate change, but are also vulnerable to its impacts, whether it’s hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, and heatwaves. With more frequent and severe climate-related events, the world must adopt climate-resilient building practices to reduce vulnerabilities, particularly in areas experiencing rapid urban growth.

Read the Building and Construction Fact Sheet (UNEP Sectoral Solution to Climate Change) to learn more.

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. 

There are a variety of roles within the procurement cycle that the guidance can support, from commissioning, category management, tender preparation and evaluation, to contract management.

Following the “build back better” principle, BPIE presents in this report six investment criteria to guide a sustainable reconstruction of Ukraine's heavily damaged built environment. The report calls on multilateral donors and the Ukrainian government to allocate funding to projects that meet ambitious energy efficiency, renewable energy, climate adaptation, and circularity criteria.

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The Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction (Buildings-GSR), a report published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC), provides an annual snapshot of the progress of the buildings and construction sector on a global scale. The Buildings-GSR 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.

As outlined in the latest edition, the buildings and construction sector contributes significantly to global climate change, accounting for about 21 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2022, buildings were responsible for 34 per cent global energy demand and 37 per cent of energy and process-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

The 2022 update of the Global Buildings Climate Tracker (GBCT) paints a concerning picture: the gap between the current state and the desired decarbonisation path is significant. To align with the 2030 milestone, an annual increase of ten decarbonisation points is now required, a substantial jump from the six points anticipated per year starting in 2015.

This year, the deep dive chapters are the following: Adaptation and resilient construction methods; Innovations in business cases as well as Nature-based solutions and biophilic design.

Learn more and download the 2023 Buildings-GSR

The report highlights the urgent global crisis of climate change, emphasizing its wide-ranging consequences on the environment, biodiversity, human health, and poverty. It particularly focuses on the vulnerability of the built environment to climate change impacts and stresses the need for immediate adaptation measures. Despite the clear benefits and urgent need for adaptation, there's a notable delay in embracing and implementing adaptation strategies across stakeholders within the buildings and construction sector, though the report demonstrates that each stakeholder already has tools and levers to contribute to the resilience of the built environment. The text then addresses various challenges hindering adaptation efforts, including reluctance to bear initial costs, a predominant focus on mitigation rather than adaptation, and the need for local-level initiatives and financial resources. It calls for collective action, emphasizing the shared responsibility of all stakeholders in addressing climate change adaptation and ensuring a sustainable future.

Download the full report and its executive summary below.

This report applies network analysis to examine the interdependencies between 75 policy and finance instruments, as well as 22 barriers, to support the transition to net zero carbon buildings. Such a network analysis approach allows us to move beyond case studies to explore potential high-impact pathways for cities to support a low-carbon transition for the building sector effectively.

Developing a systemic representation of the building sector allows us to answer the following questions:

• Which barriers should we prioritize to ensure systemic transformation of the building sector?
• Which instruments should we roll out, and in what sequence?
• What pathways can cities follow to transition to a fully decarbonized building sector?

This report offers initial findings on the general challenges and mechanisms behind the transition towards a net zero carbon buildings sector, helping shed light on concrete pathways cities can implement to decarbonize the building sector.

Download the report now

The Türkiye Building Sector Decarbonization Roadmap was meticulously developed through a transparent, participatory process within the framework of the Zero Carbon Building Accelerator (ZCBA) project, which was implemented in Colombia and Türkiye between 2021-2023. The roadmap aims to guide the building and construction industry by offering comprehensive, pioneering, and sustainable solutions to achieve the goal of combating climate change. The roadmap has been structured to reflect Türkiye’s carbon emission reduction targets and has the goal of reducing emissions throughout the entire lifecycle of buildings. It aims to transform the building industry by increasing energy efficiency, transitioning to renewable energy sources, and promoting environmentally friendly building materials and construction methods. Additionally, it includes strategies to increase the climate resilience of the building sector.

The Extended Summary provides an overview of significant information in the Roadmap.