The Path To Zero Carbon Series explores research and solutions for one of the most significant challenges of the 21^st century.  Addressing the climate crisis requires the buildings industry to reach carbon neutral design and construction across all projects. The building industry is responsible for roughly half of global warming, and the actions to reduce these emissions have a massive impact. With help from many collaborators, LMN Architechts launched this series to research, summarize, and prioritize the most important actions we can take across all emissions sources on projects within the built environment.

The team has organized the series into 4 sections:

• Framing the Challenge considers our overall impact on our environment, resilience, and equity; our responsibility for these impacts and how they impact our clients carbon emissions disclosures; and the expanding scope of carbon emissions beyond just energy and structural embodied carbon.
• Fundamentals posts cover the science, policy, and basic research that provides context for climate action, including how greenhouse gases warm the planet, the time value of carbon, how the electricity grid is transforming, and the challenges of understanding and procuring carbon offsets.
• Exploring Carbon provides research on building-scale tools, methods, and strategies to understand and reduce emissions, from whole-building reuse to emerging research on embodied carbon and the circular economy.
• Conclusions + Process wraps up the series, including revising LMN’s Sustainable Action Plan and strategizing a process to reduce and then eliminate emissions across our projects.

The series is an honest exploration of a very near-term and critical challenge, in the spirit of failing forward, enabled by a culture of sharing among sustainability professionals. Goals include identifying resources and robust tools to calculate and reduce carbon emissions where they exist; to provide actionable methods where tools do not exist; and to provide questions and links to studies where no tools or methods exist.

Please read the full report here.

WBCSD’s Roadmap to Nature Positive: Foundations for the built environment system is a step-by-step guidance with supporting material developed through extensive engagement with 8 companies, and Arcadis as lead consultant. 

This guidance identifies five subsystems to describe the different characteristics of the built environment system: buildings, urban infrastructure, transport infrastructure, marine and coastal infrastructure, and a crosscutting subsystem covering upstream mining and extraction activities. 

Download the roadmap

The Breakthrough Agenda Report 2023 is an annual collaboration between the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the United Nations Climate Change High-Level Champions, focused on supporting stronger international collaboration to drive faster reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions. This year’s report shows that current efforts on clean energy and sustainable solutions, while improving, are not yet delivering the levels of investment and deployment required to meet international climate goals. In response, it calls on governments to strengthen collaboration in key areas – such as standards and regulation, financial and technical assistance and market creation – to turbocharge the transition.

The 2023 edition, following the development of the Buildings Breakthrough, includes a Buildings chapter, developed in collaboration with GlobalABC and where five areas are identified as priorities for international collaboration to deliver near-zero emissions and resilient buildings: Standards and certification; Demand creation; Finance and investment; Research and deployment; and Knowledge and capacity-building. 

Read the report now

Member companies of the Global Cement and Concrete Association have come together as leaders in the sector to commit to producing net zero concrete by 2050, in line with global climate targets – accelerating the CO2 reductions that we have already achieved. The GCCA 2050 Net Zero Roadmap sets out in detail how collectively, in collaboration with built environment stakeholders and policymakers, we will fully decarbonise the cement and concrete industry and provide net zero concrete for the world.

This report covers the role certain types of energy service agreements (ESAs), combined with federal incentives, can play in scaling AMFH retrofits, maximizing the impact of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act in decarbonizing existing buildings.

Energy service companies (ESCOs) offer solutions for solar PV, energy efficiency, and electrification measures; often assume some amount of project performance risk; and provide project financing under an ESA. Certain types of ESAs present a viable solution for solving the split incentive issue, financing mid-cycle AMFH retrofits, and addressing the challenges owners may face covering the upfront costs of comprehensive improvements.

This report is based on interviews with ESCOs and techno-economic analysis that quantifies the potential of ESAs for financing building decarbonization packages.

The World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) published the fifth edition of its annual Advancing Net Zero (ANZ) Status Report.

The report showcases breakthrough action from across the GBC network, including the 35 GBCs participating in WorldGBC’s global Advancing Net Zero programme, 175 signatories to the Net Zero Carbon Buildings Commitment (the Commitment), the wider GBCs network, partners and more. In addition, the report also highlights collaborative efforts from the market that support WorldGBC’s mission to achieve 100% net zero carbon buildings by 2050.

Read the full report here

The focus of this report is to evaluate the strategic use of renewables, energy storage, building load flexibility, and grid coordination. These focus areas are foundational to achieving smart, connected, and high-performing buildings, and in supporting advances in grid-interactive efficient building (GEB) technologies and their adoption in the US residential building stock. This research analyzes the potential value of GEB strategies on a subset of WinnCompanies’ multifamily housing portfolio and develops an investment plan of energy projects. Through an extensive assessment of the portfolio, the study recommends packages of measures for optimized portfolio-wide investments and provides investment pathways to support decarbonization. 

Read on here

Each year, FIEC publishes its Statistical Report, which gives an insight into construction activity and demonstrates its significance for the economy as a whole.

The report analyses 22 countries individually, as well as the European Union as a whole on the basis of the following elements:

• General overview (general economic situation, general economic policy, public policies in relation to the construction industry);
• Investment in total construction, new housebuilding, renovation and maintenance of residential buildings, non-residential building and civil-engineering;
• Employment in construction and its share in overall EU employment;
• Building permits.

For the first time, the report also provides an overview of the evolution of prices for certain construction products. The texts and data contained within the report are drawn up on the basis of the national reports provided by the FIEC Member Federations.

Find the report here

CAPSA is a digital building passport data platform, developed by CUES Foundation (one of the co-chairs of the GlobalABC Work Area 5: Building measurement, data and information) and in partnership including with the Horizon Europe framework as well as with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC). 

A Building Passport (sometimes referred to as a Digital Building Logbook or (Electronic) Building File) is a whole life cycle repository of building information. It covers a building’s administrative documentation as well as data regarding its plot and location, its technical and functional characteristics, and its environmental, social and financial performance. In its fully digital realization, the Building Passport acts as a single point of input, access and visualization of all the information associated with a building. It is a living document, containing a mix of traceable static “as built” and continuous dynamic record‑keeping of performance data and information. Learn more from our report The Building Passport: A Tool for Capturing and Managing Whole Life Data and Information in Construction and Real Estate.

The CAPSA Digital Building Passport prototyping platform was developed to flank the strategic activities of the GlobalABC around the topic with a way to feasibility test ideas and methodologies. CAPSA consists of a smartphone app for data collection as well as a corresponding cloud-based data base. The smartphone app aims to enable non-expert users to generate robust and comparable data. Data collection focussed on hard and visible information, entered one info at a time. Besides direct data entry, photos are taken for context and image recognition purposes.

Download the CAPSA pamphlet to learn more. 

This issue of Danfoss's white papers presents a roadmap for decarbonizing cities. Cities account for two-thirds of global energy consumption and more than 70% of annual global carbon emissions. With more than half of the world’s population living in cities today – a number expected to increase to almost 70% in 2050 – we will not reach the goals of the Paris Agreement without a deep decarbonization of cities.

Read the key messages here.