However, an even bigger challenge is to tackle the total GHG emissions used to produce a built asset, known as embodied (or capital) carbon. As urban growth continues and new buildings are erected, the contribution of embodied carbon is projected to double by 2050, making it urgent to address mitigation strategies in the design phase.

While some types of building passport exist, a climate-ready building passport could provide the means to capture and share data on a building’s life cycle (design, build, operation) and provide owners with a pathway to meet GHG reduction goals.

Various disparate tools exist that serve specific needs, but there is a wide gap between current data availability, its formats, discoverability and useability and a fully functioning, transparent, interoperable and scalable system that could capture the diverse requirements of potential users. In other words, there are many barriers that prevent stakeholders accessing the data they need that could help to reduce the GHG emissions of a building.  

The creation of a digital “building passport” could enable a variety of stakeholders to discover and share appropriate data in a secure environment, underpinned by robust standards for data sharing, allowing for real-time reporting to enhance risk analysis that would in turn incentivise climate-ready behaviours and allow for the development of innovative insurance products. There is an urgent need to collaboratively develop the shared data infrastructure where multiple use cases for digital building passports can help incentivise net-zero behaviours.

Icebreaker One is actively looking for feedback on the idea of climate-ready building passports. We’re currently consulting with industry, and building Advisory Groups to meet this Spring. The Advisory Groups will explore the idea and provide a forum for discussion to ensure this product meets user needs.

To share feedback or express your interest in joining the Advisory Groups, send us an email on seri@ib1.org

What is a building passport?

A building passport is a tool to capture appropriate data in a digital format that could be useful to building owners, occupiers and those that have responsibility for monitoring and reporting on a building’s performance. The idea of a building passport is not new. Indeed, the European Union through the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy is providing technical support to investigate the feasibility of introducing optional building renovation passports (BRP) in the EU. Following Article 19a of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), the relevance, feasibility and potential impact of BRPs was studied and the results showed that there is low awareness of the benefits of energy renovation and insufficient knowledge of what measures to implement and in which order.

Existing building passports are able to store historical information about the design, construction and fitting out of a structure that could be made available on demand to restricted users, such as the fire services. The desire for safer built environments has been the impetus for the creation of organisations like Building Passport. For example, in the light of the Grenfell Tower tragedy and subsequent Inquiry and Phase 1 report, a vital use case for building passports is making floor plans and information that could exacerbate fire risk instantly available to rescue services. 

A climate-ready building passport could go further than providing specific information to rescue services. To enable the widest possible adoption, the concept needs to be enabled by a standards-based approach to data sharing. The Standard for Environment, Risk and Insurance (SERI) is looking to develop open standards to enable insurers to access shared environmental, financial and risk data across organisations and silos. Capturing additional environmental data will provide incentives that could support more meaningful actions to reduce GHG emissions and so underpin net-zero goals.

There are several other uses of the climate-ready building passport that could provide credible reasons for all stakeholders to collectively agree on a shared data infrastructure to support more comprehensive access to information about a building, in a secure environment with the appropriate governance structure in place. For example, the rich data captured in Building Information Modelling (BIM) does not get shared as exposure input data used in risk assessments or the catastrophe modelling process used in insurance pricing. Data standards could assist asset owners where there is no normalised process for capturing and reporting climate-related disclosures, which will soon become mandatory.

How would the data be used?

Creating a digital building passport would open up a wealth of opportunities, but it does pose an expanding hierarchy of questions depending on the user. To narrow the scope, key questions need to be answered from each stakeholder:

– What are you trying to do?
– What data are you using to do it?
– What data do you need?
– What data elements are missing?
– What data formats are missing?
– What data do you not have access to?
– Would a digital passport be the right tool to capture open / shared data?

For SERI, our goal is to encourage the development of innovative insurance products that incentivise carbon net-zero behaviours. Insurers use a wide range of data inputs to assist in pricing decisions and risk management. This data is captured from individual buildings and residential properties, through to massive schedules of information from corporate buyers (such as hotel or fast food chains). None of this data is currently structured to be captured and shared easily.

While third-party catastrophe model vendors are beginning to make their proprietary standards open, and open exposure data standards exist through the work of platforms like Oasis Loss Modelling Framework, the data that is captured is limited. Data on age, construction, number of stories together with primary modifiers like occupancy and location are supplemented by secondary modifiers such as construction quality and cladding. This data is mostly captured in spreadsheets, CSV formats or worse in PDF files. The industry is looking at new tools that could capture additional data elements leveraging more scalable software solutions such as JSON. This allows for a more powerful ability to capture hierarchical and relational data. For example, for buildings this could include:

–> Physical characteristics including its structure, orientation, materials, locations, neighbourhood
–> Use and building performance characteristics including occupancy, services & utilities, critical dependencies
–> Legal and financial characteristics – owners, portfolio relationships, leases

How to get involved!

We believe that there is an opportunity to leverage the work that was originally achieved for Open Banking, and now being used for Open Energy and help crystalise a “Shared Data Infrastructure” that could provide utility for many downstream activities.

Icebreaker One is looking for representatives from diverse organisations that are involved either in the supply or use of data to assist in developing a use case for creating a shared data infrastructure that is aligned with the goals of SERI.

We’re currently building Advisory Groups that will meet over the next few months to do this. Being part of an Advisory Group means meeting occasionally with other sector leaders, and providing insight and feedback on what Climate-Ready Building Passports could be most valuable.

To share feedback or express your interest in joining the Advisory Groups, fill out this short form. Alternatively, write to seri@ib1.org.

Meanwhile, join Icebreaker One here and help us deliver a net-zero future!

Photo credit: City of London Skyline by Trine Syvertsen CC by 2.0

For instance, CO2 concentrations will continue to rise, even in 2020: despite a 4-8% fall in global emissions since the start of the crisis, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is estimated to still increase this year. Carbon Dioxide is being emitted faster than natural sinks can absorb the carbon; in other words, the fall in emissions is too low to make a real difference. Take this comparison: the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere we would have expected to increase by 0.68% in 2020, compared to the 2019 global average. What is it projected to be this year with lockdown factored in? 0.60%. Looking at the figures, it becomes difficult to say that lockdown has actually been all that environmentally advantageous.

The truth is, fundamental requirements to achieve Net Zero are largely unchanged by the Covid-19 pandemic. We still need to make our homes way more energy efficient. We still need to find some way to reforest large parts of the countryside. We still need to transition away from petroleum-based fuels. Beyond the fact that the environmental impact of lockdown is not as great as reputed, shutting down great portions of society permanently was always going to be a poor solution to the climate crisis.

Having said all of that, there are lessons from lockdown that can be learned for environmentalists. Pre-crisis, commuting and business travel made up around a third of transport-related carbon emissions. While the impact of more people working at home isn’t wholly environmentally positive – a lot more energy is being consumed in homes, to take one big example of a negative impact of home-working on the environment – getting more people off the road has obviously been positive for the environment. Even if people do head back to the office in bigger numbers once the Covid-19 crisis is deemed to be at an end, whenever that might be, trying to limit the number of cars used in commuting would be advantageous. Pre-crisis, more than 50% of workers in Britain used a motor vehicle to commute, whereas only 4% cycled to work. Now that we have confirmed via experience that cutting down on commuting cars is positive, we can try and continue that trend.

Demonstrating that carbon emissions can come down if we actively try and cut them may be the lasting legacy of the lockdown from an environmental perspective. That in and of itself should be seen as a positive.

To start with, we’ll look at how the UK has managed to reduce the carbon emissions it physically produces by 39% over the last thirty years. Firstly, the reduction of coal usage over that period. Coal’s share of the UK’s total carbon emissions was 28% in 2012; by 2018, that had fallen to 5.5%. Secondly, the amount of energy efficiency improvements made over the last three decades, in particular more efficient household appliances combined with the phase out of incandescent lightbulbs. This has resulted in reduced emissions across several sectors, most notably, residential, business, energy and the public sector. Thirdly, mostly through subsidies, cleaner power has become much more prevalent. Energy from renewable sources was only 4.56% of the UK market in 2006; in 2019, this had jumped to 35.8%.

Yet there is a fourth and final macro reason that carbon emissions have fallen in the UK over the last thirty years, and it is perhaps the most important as well as being the simplest to explain. The United Kingdom makes far less stuff than it once did.

The sale of manufactured goods accounted for 16.7% of UK GDP in 1990; by 2019, that figure had fallen to 8.6%. The peak of carbon emissions created on UK soil was 1972, at which time manufacturing accounted for 28.1% of the UK’s GDP. In 1990, 15.7% of all jobs in the UK were manufacturing in nature; by 2019, that figure had fallen to 7.6%. What’s even more stark is that in 1981, 21.8% of all jobs in the UK were in manufacturing, demonstrating the long term nature of this trend. While there are other factors which account for the decline of carbon emissions being created in the UK, such as the three I described above, the decline of manufacturing over the period in question is key – particularly as it will affect how much of a carbon footprint the UK creates over the next decade as the country leaves the European Union. The UK has become an economy heavily focused on services, which means that it is importing a lot of its goods from elsewhere. Rather than actually eliminate its carbon footprint, the UK has taken it offshore.

Britain imports products that are carbon intensive that are made elsewhere to make up for the gap in terms of the country not producing what it wants/needs within its own territory. We can split this off with appropriate definitions for each of the two ways to evaluate carbon emissions: the territorial-based creation of carbon emissions, which is the amount of emission that originates on UK soil, created directly by sources in the United Kingdom; then we have the consumption-based measure of carbon emissions, which is includes the emissions from all imported goods as well. The UK imports around 200 million tonnes worth of extra-territorial carbon emissions each year – which takes the country’s total carbon emissions figure close to what the 1990 figure was, wiping out the impressive carbon cutting we’ve seen within the borders of the UK over the intervening period.

This is where the B-word needs to make an entrance. Leaving the European Union throws a lot of this in the air for the UK. One reason is because if the UK is going to start manufacturing more post-Brexit – and whether it will or will not is excessively unclear, even at this point, several months away from the end of the transition period – that will increase the territorial-based carbon footprint of the country unless steps are taken to avoid this. Which, given the fact that no one is clear on what will happen post-Brexit in the manufacturing sector in particular, is worrying. We could see a worst-case scenario arise, one in which the UK manufactures more, increasing carbon emissions, all while importing from countries with less than efficient greenhouse gas regulations, meaning the UK could be both creating more carbon emissions on home soil and importing from carbon intensive sources. In other words, we could see a rise in both territorial-based carbon emissions and consumption-based emissions at the same time.

All of this makes understanding the problems as well as potential solutions ever more crucial at this sensitive moment in which we not only have to think about economic recovery from the Covid crisis, but Brexit as well.