The INDICATE initiative will bring together governments, industry and academia to tackle one of the most common barriers to enacting policies which will ensure climate neutral construction: a lack of reliable and comprehensive emissions data for buildings.
INDICATE seeks to accelerate policy development across Europe by generating critical baseline data for buildings, which can help guide policymakers to set carbon limits that cover the full lifecycle impact of buildings, from manufacture and construction, through to deconstruction and waste processing - the so-called ‘whole life carbon limits’.
Currently, almost all building regulations in Europe only address carbon emissions from the building operation, ignoring the missions that are generated before a building comes into use and at the end of its life[1]. These embodied carbon emissions – which together with operational CO2 are known as whole life carbon – can be more than half of a new building’s total carbon footprint and threaten to consume national construction carbon budgets well ahead of 2050 net zero goals.
Certain leading markets like Denmark, Finland, France and the Netherlands have already enacted whole life carbon policies. The first crucial step in setting these was to establish baselines. Other European countries are held back from following this example due to a lack of necessary data[2].
The coalition behind INDICATE is changing this. The innovative public-private approach of the project aims to secure broad support and investment for the results from industry and policy makers alike, helping to ensure the resulting data can be quickly put to . This is just the beginning of what the coalition hopes will be a European wide programme to finally quantify and drive a quick reduction in unregulated carbon emissions.
The EU recently took its own first steps towards whole life carbon regulation with proposals to introduce mandatory reporting in the revision of a key piece of European buildings policy, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). By strengthening political support and industry capability amongst more countries INDICATE will help to overcome opposition seen from some Member States to the ambitious proposals EU lawmakers have put forward for the EPBD revision.
Petr Serafín, Director, Department of construction and building materials, Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic
“We greatly appreciate that we can participate with our projects in the INDICATE, which will financially and technically support the creation of several case studies mapping carbon emissions during the entire life cycle of buildings. We believe that thanks to this project we will obtain relevant data about the building stock, not only about new buildings, but also about existing objects. Valid data is essential to move towards carbon neutrality in decarbonisation, which we should achieve by 2050 according to the Paris Agreement. A big benefit of the project is that it also includes presentations of study results to all interested parties, including the state administration.”
Francis-Noel Duffy, Member of Dáil Éireann for Dublin South West and the Green Party Spokesperson for Housing
“Addressing embodied carbon emissions is critical to halve our emissions by 2030, and reach carbon neutrality by 2050. The development of high quality data and baseline data for buildings constructed in Ireland through pilot projects is a key step in supporting the regulation of these emissions in Ireland.”
Joe Durkan, Head of Technical – National Retrofit, Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland
“High-quality data on whole life carbon emissions associated with our built environment is critical to support policymaking and the decarbonisation of our building stock. SEAI recognises the importance of collecting standardised data through the development of a national methodology to assess these emissions and is pleased to support the INDICATE project.”
The partners in the three newly launched national pilots are:
Czechia
With support from the Ministries of Environment and of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic.
Ireland:
INDICATE is being carried out through Construct Innovate, Ireland’s national research centre for construction technology and innovation. The lead partners above are supported by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, University College Dublin and Associate Members of Construct Innovate.
Spain:
With the Government of Spain as observers.
INDICATE was launched in December 2022 by a European consortium including the Building Performance Institute Europe (BPIE), the Catholic University (KU) Leuven and World Green Building Council (WorldGBC), and is coordinated by Danish consultancy, Smith Innovation. It is co-funded by the Laudes Foundation and cash or in-kind contributions from national partners, including national governments.
Read more on https://www.indicatedata.com/
About the INDICATE project:
Why INDICATE?
INDICATE is meeting one of the most fundamental challenges to decarbonise buildings – the lack of data to support policymaking and strategic business decision-making. The building and construction sector accounts for approximately 40% of global carbon emissions. This needs to change! INDICATE pushes for policy and industry to tackle both operational and embodied carbon - ‘Whole Life Carbon’ (WLC) – since it is crucial to reduce the climate impact of new construction and renovation.
National partnerships will be forged between industry, academia, and national government. This co-creation approach promises to ensure the stakeholders will act on the data and the outcomes to accelerate policy and industry change.
What is INDICATE?
INDICATE is an accelerator offering a project framework and co-funding to support efforts to generate much-needed building-level WLC data in Europe. This data must be generated now if industry and policy action on decarbonising buildings are to be brought in line with the 1,5 °C target from the 2015 Paris COP21 agreement.
INDICATE offers a combination of financial support and technical advice on both ‘Life Cycle Analysis’ (LCA) data and policy advocacy. This support is targeted at generating the data foundation, whilst INDICATE’s cocreation approach and advocacy support are designed to ensure the all-important buy in of industry and policy makers to take and use the data to accelerate progress towards a fully decarbonised building stock.
With grants up to €250.000 per country, INDICATE supports the collection of systemized and improved data of new or existing building LCA results. It directly enables generation of insights into the state of the respective national building stock and carbon reduction potential of different national strategies. To ensure buy-in from supported consortiums there is a requirement of public co-funding. As of February 2023, INDICATE is supporting three pilot countries.
INDICATE Partners:
About BPIE
BPIE (Buildings Performance Institute Europe) is Europe's leading independent think tank
with a focus on independent analysis and knowledge dissemination, supporting evidence based policymaking in the field of energy and carbon performance of buildings, throughout
Europe and beyond. BPIE provides open-source research, analysis, knowledge-sharing and
advisory activities to the European Institutions, policymakers in EU Member States and
neighbouring countries, the scientific community as well as private sector stakeholders and
the civil society.
Website: https://www.bpie.eu/
About KU Leuven
The research group Architectural Engineering tackles innovation in the design of buildings
by approaching architecture from an engineering point of view. The group conducts cutting-edge research on technical aspects of architecture, considering structure, materials,
services, and comfort requirements in a multidisciplinary setting in order to quantify,
assess, and improve the quality, cost, and sustainability of the built environment.
Website: https://eng.kuleuven.be/en
About Laudes Foundation
Laudes Foundation is a philanthropic foundation founded in 2020 and working in the
intersection of research, policy, and pre-commercial industry practice. Laudes is
responding to the dual crises of inequality and climate change by supporting systemic
change within the built environment, fashion industry and new economic thinking.
Website: https://www.laudesfoundation.org/
About Smith Innovation
Assist philanthropic foundations, local governments as well as companies and organizations in the building industry to take a leading role in the transition towards a sustainable future.
Website: https://smithinnovation.dk/en
About WorldGBC
The World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) is the largest and most influential local-regional-global action network, leading the transformation to sustainable and decarbonised
built environments for everyone, everywhere.
Together, with 75+ Green Building Councils and industry partners from all around the
world, we are driving systemic changes to:
- Address whole life carbon emissions of existing and new buildings
- Enable resilient, healthy, equitable and inclusive places
- Secure regenerative, resource efficient and waste-free infrastructure
Website: https://worldgbc.org/