Decarbonising economic activities should be the number one priority of the real estate industry. Our collective challenge is to measure carbon emissions reliably, and then design action levers to reduce them.

There are many ongoing commendable initiatives towards measuring the carbon footprint of real estate, but these are not coordinated – neither locally nor on a European scale, resulting in inconsistent Carbon KPIs : everybody is lost…

There exist however (1) European standards for Carbon Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), (2) databases for the carbon footprint of construction materials and operations, and (3) a common European framework for carbon assessment and reporting Level(s).

To harmonise practices and stop the confusion, major actors in the European real estate industry (from the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Germany) have joined forces, and developed a Pan-European carbon footprint calculation method, entirely based on these existing standards.

This is the Low Carbon Building Initiative (LCBI), which is both a low carbon design tool that allows to measure and pilot carbon performance of european projects and a reporting framework fully aligned with European requirements.

A pan-European low carbon label will be derived from the LCBI carbon Life-Cycle Analysis to foster low carbon quantification in real estate decision-making.

The LCBI methodology will be revealed for the first time on the 10th of May at 11 : 00 AM CET.