Climate-Smart From The Start: Rebuilding Building From The Ground Up
Building design can determine a structure’s emissions for generations. Strategic landscaping, natural light, and well-insulated and sustainable materials reduce energy demand for heating, cooling, and lighting. On-site renewable energy sources, energy storage, and energy-efficient appliances further limit buildings’ carbon impact.
The buildings in which we live and work are some of the world’s biggest drivers of climate change. When you count both the materials that go into them and the energy they consume over their lifetimes, these buildings’ emissions are major: in fact, they’re responsible for nearly 40% of global energy-related CO₂ emissions. With the sum of our living and work space certain to keep growing, today’s design and construction decisions will lock in emissions for decades to come. That’s why we need to rebuild the way we build, integrating climate intelligence into every square foot of every new structure — and retrofitting what’s already standing. We already have powerful tools at hand: modular and industrialized construction, high-performance envelope retrofits, design optimization that eliminates waste, and building systems that empower large-scale material reuse. Pair these approaches with more ambitious concepts like carbon-negative building shells and next-generation materials that outperform cement and steel, and it’s entirely possible to transform a $14 trillion industry from the ground up.
Using IPCC and GCAM data, Energy Innovation projected future “greenhouse gas emissions at stake” in 2050, assuming current policies remain in place. The resulting estimates overlap because different technologies may reduce the same emissions pool.
The Path We’re On
Building is bulldozing our climate goals.
The built environment has a built-in carbon load — and it’s a heavy one. Like most climate challenges, this one is expected to grow with the world’s population. By 2030, global floor area is expected to increase by 15%. That’s the equivalent of matching the entire floor area of every building in North America within a few short years.
Where do building emissions come from?
Buildings generate climate impact across their entire lifespan — not just while they’re standing.
- Embodied emissions are released upfront during material extraction, manufacturing, and construction. Cement, steel, glass, and aluminum carry a heavy carbon load long before a building opens its doors.
- Operational emissions accrue over decades as buildings consume energy for heating, cooling, lighting, and power. Because design choices lock in long-term energy demand, many of the most significant efficiency gains are determined before construction even begins — through strategies like passive design, orientation, and envelope performance. While operational efficiency is explored in depth on its own page, addressing both operational and embodied emissions at the design stage is essential to minimizing a building’s full lifecycle carbon footprint.
Then there’s a third, often overlooked driver. End-of-life is less an emissions problem than a missed opportunity. Building demolition discards carbon-intensive materials that required enormous energy to produce, locking in demand for fresh extraction and manufacturing. Although end-of-life contributes relatively little in direct emissions, a building’s total lifecycle carbon burden can be substantially reduced with smarter reuse, retrofitting, and material recovery.
In short, decarbonizing buildings means rethinking their full lifecycle — from first sketch to final disassembly.
The good news? Though further innovation is essential, building is one of the few sectors where negative green premiums exist today. In construction, price is paramount. Solutions that lower upfront costs while also cutting lifecycle emissions can make sustainable building the default, rather than the exception. The business case is already compelling. Beyond emissions reductions, sustainable buildings deliver lower operating costs, higher asset values, and stronger demand from tenants and buyers who prioritize efficiency, health, and resilience. Together, these advantages create a compelling ROI for developers and owners. They position sustainable construction not simply as a climate imperative, but as a fast-growing economic opportunity within a $14 trillion industry that’s only getting bigger.
“Half of the buildings that will exist by 2050 have not yet been built. This is a major opportunity for the sector to reimagine the buildings of the future – buildings that prioritize resilience, renovation and reuse, renewable energy generation and low carbon construction.” - UNEP
A New Way Forward
Climate-smart from the start: sustainable foundations for the future of building
The most important climate decisions in building are made before construction begins. Design choices determine a building’s embodied carbon, its long-term efficiency potential, and whether its materials can be reused rather than wasted at end of life. The imperatives and moonshots that follow focus on these structural decisions. They reimagine how we build new structures, adapt what already exists, and preserve material value across generations.
Innovation Imperatives
Create new design tools to improve material efficiency in construction and enable low-carbon material selection
Traditional design processes often prioritize cost and performance without factoring in material use and embodied carbon. Next-generation design tools can align these priorities by integrating lifecycle assessments, comfort, and pricing data into a single platform. By helping architects and engineers optimize for material efficiency, structural performance, and operating costs all at once, these tools enable solutions that save money while also reducing emissions. More advanced structural modeling can help us build significantly stronger buildings that use fewer materials. At scale, this kind of optimization can make climate-positive design decisions the new normal.
Accelerate retrofit solutions that dramatically improve insulation and thermal performance in existing buildings
Half of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are already standing, which makes retrofitting one of the most powerful levers for reducing operational emissions. Innovations in high-performance insulation materials, envelope sealing technologies, advanced glazing, dynamic window tints, and reflective or absorptive coatings can sharply reduce heating and cooling demand in aging building stock. Prefabricated, modular retrofit systems can further reduce cost, labor, and disruption, enabling fast and affordable envelope upgrades at scale. By improving thermal performance across millions of existing structures, these solutions reduce reliance on HVAC, lower energy bills, and enhance comfort and resilience in a warming climate.
Design new buildings to self-cool and self-regulate temperature with minimal mechanical energy
New construction offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lock in low operational emissions for decades. Passive design strategies — thoughtful building orientation, shading systems, cross-ventilation, daylighting, and the use of thermal mass — can dramatically reduce the need for mechanical heating and cooling from day one. Coupled with high-performance envelopes and climate-aware architectural planning, these approaches make buildings naturally energy-efficient, comfortable, and resilient. Embedding passive performance into the design phase ensures that new buildings start out climate-smart, reducing lifetime emissions while enhancing occupant experience.
Increase industrialization of construction using modular, panelized, unitized, and volumetric solutions with low-carbon materials
Traditional construction methods are slow, labor-intensive, and carbon-heavy. By shifting toward climate-friendly systems built in controlled factory settings, developers can reduce waste, better integrate low-carbon materials, and deliver higher-performing building envelopes. This repeatability leads to tighter, more energy-efficient buildings from the outset, cutting operational emissions for decades to come. At the same time, industrialized approaches speed up delivery and reduce costs, making sustainable building more affordable and scalable worldwide.
Develop materials and methods for construction/deconstruction that enable a high degree of circularity
Most buildings are designed for single use of materials, locking in carbon and generating massive waste at end-of-life. By contrast, circular building uses modular designs, recyclable or reusable materials (particularly concrete), and deconstruction methods that recover high-value components at scale. Advancing these approaches could dramatically cut embodied emissions, reduce landfill waste, and create new value streams — turning buildings into material banks that support a low-carbon, circular economy.
Design durable, adaptable structures that last for generations
Today, most buildings and infrastructure are designed with a limited lifespan, locking us into a wasteful cycle of demolition and reconstruction that squanders resources and generates large volumes of emissions. This imperative focuses on creating "heirloom" buildings designed for multigenerational use. To do that, we must innovate the materials at their core, like corrosion-free rebar and advanced concrete, so they’re able to last lifetimes. Alongside material durability, this imperative requires designing for reconfigurability, using modular systems and adaptable layouts that allow a building's interior to evolve over centuries without needing to tear down its carbon-intensive structure. This approach dramatically reduces the lifecycle embodied carbon of our built environment, preserving the massive initial carbon investment and turning our cities into lasting assets rather than disposable commodities.
Moonshots
Develop easy-to-apply building coatings and materials that actively remove GHGs
What if buildings didn’t just emit less carbon, but actively eliminated GHGs like CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide from the air? Carbon-negative shells imagine exterior coatings and materials that remove or capture GHGs through mineralization, photocatalysis, or bio-based processes. If made affordable and easy to apply, these materials could transform buildings into distributed carbon sinks, turning cities into active participants in climate mitigation. Globally, we’re projected to add another New York City’s worth of buildings every month for the next 40 years — which means the potential for GHG removal is monumental.
Create low-carbon building materials that outperform steel and cement in structural applications
Steel and cement are the backbone of modern construction. They’re also among the most carbon-intensive industries on Earth. It may be possible to engineer entirely new classes of structural materials — engineered composites, bio-based alternatives, or advanced ceramics — that can match or surpass steel and cement in strength, durability, and cost, while also slashing embodied emissions. Breakthroughs in this area could redefine the built environment, enabling sustainable infrastructure without sacrificing performance.
The most viable solutions will:
Given the incentive misalignment between who pays (builders/developers) and who benefits (building occupants), new solutions need to be cheaper — or at least not significantly more expensive — upfront. Innovators should consider this general rule of thumb, used by Energy Service Companies (ESCOs): if a solution has a three-year payback on additional upfront cost, it will be an easy sell. If the payback takes between three and eight years, it’s a harder sell, but still doable. Beyond that, builders are unlikely to buy in unless required by code or policy.
Sustainability cannot come at the expense of livability. Any scalable solution must ensure that buildings remain healthy, safe, and high-performing for their occupants. This means delivering consistent thermal comfort, good air quality, natural light, and acoustic performance — while also meeting or exceeding durability and resilience standards. Where possible, sustainable design should actively enhance comfort and performance, resulting in spaces that are healthier and more enjoyable to live and work in than their carbon-laden predecessors.
For adoption at scale, solutions must align with the realities of the construction industry. They need to be compatible with established building codes, construction methods, and supply chains. That means materials and systems must be available in sufficient volumes worldwide, not only in niche markets, and be easy for builders and contractors to incorporate without requiring new skills or workflows. Approaches that complement existing practices — or can be standardized and industrialized — will see the fastest uptake.
