Calculating carbon emissions at each stage of a building’s life cycle – construction, operations, and end of life –, with a harmonized methodology across Europe, is necessary to quantify and compare real carbon footprints of buildings. Today, such a common language does not exist.

To address this pressing issue, the Low Carbon Building Initiative (LCBI) assembled a consortium of technical experts, alongside major real estate stakeholders. Together, they have worked since 2022 to create a common European carbon accounting language. This methodology includes specific carbon emissions targets – basis to obtain LCBI label - providing a clear path towards achieving lower carbon emissions. 

Taking the Level(s) framework as a basis, and also using the EU-funded CRREM tool, the LCBI has designed a comprehensive set of common parameters for measuring whole-life carbon. We believe this LCBI methodology, made available since April of this year, outperforms other metrics available. Moreover, it has the greatest potential for providing a genuinely harmonised and cross-border approach for the Single Market, something that is still lacking.

The new LCBI metric is being experimented on 16 projects across Europe: in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, Netherlands.

Starting from that, the activities we aim at implementing are: the improvement of our methodology, the development of LCBI geographical scope, the extension of the methodology to retrofit buildings, and the overall deployment of our methodology and label throughout Europe. 

Our end goal is the endorsement or recognition by the EU of a comprehensive and cross-border metric for buildings whole life carbon emissions. We believe it will provide a powerful signal to the market to start investing in low carbon construction.

Intermediary goals are : 1) growing LCBI label adoption by european stakeholders 2) development of a retrofit metric 3) 4) Eventual partnerships with other initiatives to extend scope