Supporting the development of a roadmap for the reduction of whole life carbon of buildings : final report

This report provides the whole-life carbon (WLC) emission baseline and projections of EU buildings according to three different scenarios. It is the final report of the study Supporting the development of a roadmap for the reduction of WLC in buildings, commissioned by DG Environment of the European Commission. These results summarise the work of the study team in scaling up building-level emissions to the entire EU building stock through the modelling of building archetypes and stock-level activities such as new construction, energy efficiency renovation and demolition. This is done by assessing the potential of a list of solutions that can help reducing the operational and embodied carbon footprint of buildings, ranging from sufficiency measures avoiding new constructions to improvements in material production and efficiency in material use, as well as increasing the market share of alternative building materials. The findings presented in this report are based on an approach that brings together three key workstreams to gain a better understanding of the building stock's WLC emissions and to outline future pathways for decarbonisation: 1. representative building archetypes are used to reflect the lifecycle impacts of new and existing buildings across the EU; 2. embodied carbon reduction solutions quantify the decarbonisation potential and implementation curve for measures to avoid new construction, improve building design, and shift to low-carbon materials. These solutions have been primarily assessed and applied to new constructions, though a limited set of these reduction options have also been included in modelling low carbon renovations. The low carbon solutions are modelled to their respective maximum capacity by 2040; 3. building stock modelling integrates the above two analyses as well as wider macroeconomic, demographic and decarbonisation trends to quantify the emissions and pathway scenarios between 2020 and 2050.