What comes to mind when you think of “sustainable building”? Mud walls and green roofs? Insulation and triple-glazed windows? Sector coupling and artificial intelligence? All correct. But for these right tools and concepts to be successfully applied in practice, it’s not enough for them to work “in principle.” Innovative solutions must also function when applied on a large scale and with high speed in existing buildings.
We’ve waited for decades for politics and society to truly take sustainable building seriously. Now, with the first very concrete effects of climate change already visible, we are suddenly taking action. From Greta Thunberg to the European Commission’s Green Deal, it seems a switch has been flipped. The government is providing massive investment funds for existing buildings, and private investors, banks, and insurance companies have recognized the issue. While, as expected, the early movers in the industry are leading the way, building ESG teams, trying to gather data on their buildings, and evaluating climate pathways and stranded assets, even the hesitant ones know that this issue will not pass them by.
The momentum behind this movement is enormous. To put it into perspective: The construction industry has consistently realized a renovation rate of around 1% of the building stock per year in recent years. Now, the European Commission is aiming for a rate of 2%, or even 3%, if possible. Why these high growth rates? Quite simply: If the renovation rate were doubled, by 2050 — the year we aim to be climate-neutral — nearly half of the building stock would still be untouched, let alone emissions-free. For these plans to work, the industry must increase its capacity or productivity — ideally both — within a few years, at a scale that no industry has ever achieved before, perhaps with the exception of microprocessors, where the doubling of performance every 18 months as per Moore’s Law still somewhat applies.
To achieve a strong increase in investments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the building stock, pressure is now being applied at various levels. On the one hand, through the global tool of carbon pricing. Here, the technical detail initially doesn’t matter. Whoever emits CO2 must pay. And market mechanisms will drive the optimal selection of tools. In the “normal” industry and its products, this can work. In many areas, particularly construction, the mechanisms of the economy are so complex and detailed that carbon pricing alone will not be enough. The lack of holistic product liability and the complicated responsibility enforcement regarding performance deficits from building planning, construction, and operation shows that we need other mechanisms to reduce emissions in existing buildings. The EU has recently introduced the Taxonomy Regulation, which defines which activities are “green” in different sectors of the economy. For the building sector, this includes requirements for “owning” green buildings and providing green services. While reading the Taxonomy Regulation, I was amazed at how much it delves into technical detail.
In the future, building and service compliance with the Taxonomy will be an important component of contracts in the construction sector. We will need to determine what is truly green. Taxonomy compliance will become part of contracts for planning and construction services, sustainability will be a component of service-level agreements, and certification and auditing contracts will be required to ensure or verify compliance. Therefore, we need to ensure that the technical concepts mentioned above can always be contractually secured — we need simple and robust “contractability” for these solutions that can scale with the increasing number of construction measures without causing more costs and effort for legal disputes in construction. That’s why synavision, together with REHVA and EUROVENT, launched the COPILOT certification two years ago as a digital proof of a systematic quality management process for buildings. It can now be used to demonstrate technical monitoring as part of a DGNB certification. The COPILOT certification can also be anchored in general contractor contracts by an independent third party with a simple clause. This makes building performance easily “contractable” and reliably ensures sustainability.
