Decarbonisation scenarios for the European building stock are usually run at aggregate level, which hides how differently they play out across countries, building types and construction practices. The paper behind this talk, published in Nature Communications with KU Leuven, TU Graz and IIASA, models those differences explicitly, and the pathways that result are not interchangeable.
That is the point worth carrying into a session about cooling and clean air: what works in one country’s stock is not a template for another’s, and a pathway that averages them is a pathway nobody can follow.
The other four contributions and the session's format are being settled between the presenters. This post names the session, the date and our part in it; the programme is the organisers' to publish.
]]>This profile is tentative. We will design the final profile and the extent together with the person we hire, based on their strengths, interests and our project needs. We value initiative: if you see a better way to contribute, tell us.
Read the full advert as a PDF: the role, what you bring, how we work, what we offer, relocation and housing, and how to apply, in one document.
Send your application as three PDFs to office@riselabs.at with the subject line RISE-Team-2611-01 - [Your name]. Applications without a Position ID in the subject line may not be considered.
Applications are open until 4 December 2026. Reviewing and interviewing start on 18 November 2026 and continue until the position is filled, so earlier applications have the advantage of an earlier conversation.
Applying for more than one position? List all Position IDs in the subject line and tell us in your letter which you prefer and why.
]]>You will work with building-level LCA data and national building data, such as EPC databases, building registries and generic LCA databases, to define what data countries need, develop benchmarks, and build open tools and templates for INDICATE and GBDI with partners in Europe, Asia and Africa. You will work closely with our Senior Scientist for whole life carbon and LCA (RISE-Team-2611-02). The position can be combined with a PhD.
This profile is tentative. We will design the final profile and the extent together with the person we hire, based on their strengths, interests and our project needs. We value initiative: if you see a better way to contribute, tell us.
Read the full advert as a PDF: the role, what you bring, how we work, what we offer, relocation and housing, and how to apply, in one document.
Send your application as three PDFs to office@riselabs.at with the subject line RISE-Team-2611-03 - [Your name]. Applications without a Position ID in the subject line may not be considered.
Applications are open until 4 December 2026. Reviewing and interviewing start on 18 November 2026 and continue until the position is filled, so earlier applications have the advantage of an earlier conversation.
Applying for more than one position? List all Position IDs in the subject line and tell us in your letter which you prefer and why.
]]>You will work directly with the Director and the Global Partnerships and Programmes Lead (RISE-Team-2611-01), and closely with our Junior Scientist for whole life carbon and LCA (RISE-Team-2611-03) and GBDI’s software engineers.
This profile is tentative. We will design the final profile and the extent together with the person we hire, based on their strengths, interests and our project needs. We value initiative: if you see a better way to contribute, tell us.
Read the full advert as a PDF: the role, what you bring, how we work, what we offer, relocation and housing, and how to apply, in one document.
Send your application as three PDFs to office@riselabs.at with the subject line RISE-Team-2611-02 - [Your name]. Applications without a Position ID in the subject line may not be considered.
Applications are open until 4 December 2026. Reviewing and interviewing start on 18 November 2026 and continue until the position is filled, so earlier applications have the advantage of an earlier conversation.
Applying for more than one position? List all Position IDs in the subject line and tell us in your letter which you prefer and why.
]]>The question behind it: bio-based materials hold carbon inside a building for as long as the building stands, and that is often offered on its own as a reason to build with them. Storage is not the same as mitigation, though, and neither is the same as something the world can supply. This paper separates the three, across global urban building stocks from 2020 to 2100, at substitution levels of 10%, 30% and 50%.
What it finds:
The finding worth carrying out of it is the last one, and it is not the arithmetic. Reaching the full storage potential through material substitution alone would need a substantial expansion of biochar supply, and for wood it depends strongly on how far substitution actually goes. Demand-side measures are not a supplement to the material switch. They are what brings it within reach.
That is the same argument this institute makes about the building stock generally, arrived at here from the material side: what is physically possible and what is available at scale are different questions, and only the second one decides anything.
Read the paper, which is open access, or see it in our publications.
]]>The rest of this post is about the afternoon session.
Whole life carbon assessment now produces genuinely valuable evidence about how buildings and infrastructure perform. It has not, by itself, delivered a single near-zero emission building.
That is the gap the session is about. Measurement is not management. Evidence that sits in a report, in an incompatible format, or behind a consultant’s licence does not reach the decisions that actually determine what gets built: a target, a regulation, an investment criterion, a procurement specification, a market incentive. Making the evidence accessible, connected and useful is a different problem from producing it, and it is the one that has been left largely unsolved.
On rapidly urbanising and Global South markets, which is where most of the floor area of the coming decades will be built and where the data infrastructure for whole life carbon largely does not exist yet. “Proportionate and scalable” is doing real work in that sentence: a method that presumes a mature LCA consultancy market and a national materials database is not a method those countries can adopt, however rigorous it is.
That is the same gap the Global Building Data Initiative was set up to close, and the reason a benchmark derived mostly from European and North American buildings is not a global benchmark.
Policymakers and government representatives; investors and financial institutions; asset owners; standards organisations; built environment practitioners; data and technology providers; and anyone working on national building decarbonisation strategies - particularly in emerging and Global South markets.
The venue for the afternoon session and the speaker line-up for both will be confirmed closer to the conference.
]]>Martin Röck has been invited to join the opening Leadership Panel, “Global Pathways to Green, Resilient & Net-Zero Buildings and Built Environments”, on 26 November, immediately following the inaugural session. The panel brings together international perspectives alongside the National Institute of Urban Affairs and senior leaders from across the built environment sector.
The discussion covers decarbonisation, building performance and data, regenerative systems, climate resilience, circularity, policy and innovation - and how international evidence translates into something usable in a market building at India’s pace.
India is among the two largest green building markets in the world by registered footprint, and most of the floor area of the coming decades will be built in countries where the data infrastructure for whole life carbon does not yet exist. That is the gap the Global Building Data Initiative was set up to close, and it is why we keep showing up in these rooms.
The Congress is convened by the Indian Green Building Council, part of the Confederation of Indian Industry, with participation from the World Green Building Council and the Government of Maharashtra as partner state.
This is part of the GBDI China and India Cooperation Incubator, which extends the global building data work into the two markets that will add the most floor area this century.
Source: greenbuildingcongress.com · World Green Building Council.
]]>Roundtable discussions, introduced by the roundtable leads and Smith Innovation, on four questions the sector has not yet answered:
Key points from the roundtables are presented at 11:30, followed by lunch and networking.
Opened by Giulia Carbonari (World Green Building Council), with an interview with Ciarán Cuffe moderated by Miles Rowland (WorldGBC). Zsolt Toth (BPIE) moderates the panel discussion; Martin Röck joins the panel alongside Paul Astle (Ramboll), with DG ENER and EBC to be confirmed. Josefina Lindblom (DG ENV) presents the Staff Working Document, and Adam Rietti (Smith Innovation) sets out what INDICATE LIFE achieved. Networking and a cocktail close the day.
The event is open and registration is required: register here.
The project consortium also meets in Brussels on 21 and 22 October for internal community building. That part is closed, and we expect to write about what came out of it afterwards.
Invitation issued by the INDICATE LIFE team via the World Green Building Council. More on the project at indicatedata.com.
]]>The founding group spans assessment, design, materials, software and standards: 2050 Materials, AECOM, Arcadis, ASHRAE, Autodesk, Avison Young, Buro Happold, GBDI, Heidelberg Materials, Mace Consult, Morgan Sindall, ORIS Materials Intelligence, Turner & Townsend, WAP (an SLR company), WBCSD and We2Sure.
It is positioned to support the Market Transformation Action Agenda and the Buildings Breakthrough, which are pushing in the same direction.
The practical consequence for an assessor is a move away from modelling every project from scratch towards assessments that are comparable, with models and data that survive a change of jurisdiction. For the people building tools and standards, it means building once and scaling across markets, with cleaner interoperability with BIM and LCA software and benchmarking data that can actually be compared.
This is the problem our own work keeps running into from the other side. A global buildings database is only as useful as the comparability of what goes into it, and every benchmark study we have worked on has begun by reconciling datasets that were never meant to be reconciled. Harmonising the methods is the part that makes the data worth collecting.
More at rics.org.
]]>The Global Building Data Initiative has been established as an association under Austrian law, led by Martin Röck. Until now GBDI has run as a programme inside a research consortium with EPFL; as an association it gains a legal home, a governance structure, and the ability to hold funding and employ staff directly.
For RISE this changes little day to day and quite a lot structurally. The two teams will continue to work together closely, with more and more of the GBDI team moving to Vienna in the future, some colleagues will hold contracts with both organizations. GBDI can now grow on its own terms, as an open data commons accountable to its community and partners.
A new tiered collaboration model for GBDI partners will be presented in the coming months.
More on the initiative at gbdi.io.
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