The 31st UN Climate Change Conference runs from 9 to 20 November 2026 in Antalya, Türkiye, under the Türkiye–Australia partnership modalities. Two sessions there take up whole life carbon, both on Monday 16 November, and between them they split the problem in half: better data in the morning, what to do with it in the afternoon.
- 10:00 to 11:00, Finland Pavilion. “Accelerating Solutions Through Better Whole Life Carbon Data and Better Decisions”, convened by GlobalABC and RICS.
- 14:00 to 15:00. “Turning Whole Life Carbon Data and Evidence into Climate Action”, convened by RICS, WBCSD, the Global Building Data Initiative and GlobalABC, presenting CLEAR, the Coalition for Life Cycle Emissions Alignment and Reporting, of which GBDI is a founding member.
The rest of this post is about the afternoon session.
The argument
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.
What the session covers
- From evidence to instruments. How whole life carbon evidence can inform
targets, regulation, investment criteria, procurement and market incentives
- and what has to be true of the evidence before it can.
- Circularity in the same frame. Supporting more circular approaches to the use, reuse and recovery of buildings and materials, rather than treating circularity as a separate agenda with its own metrics.
- Connecting the scales. How consistent methodologies, interoperable data and approaches such as Digital Building Passports link building-level evidence to building-stock baselines, to finance, and to national roadmaps. A number that cannot travel between those scales is not much use at any of them.
- Alignment as the enabling condition. How CLEAR and initiatives like it can support the alignment and collaboration that makes the rest possible - moving from carbon measurement to carbon management through proportionate, scalable approaches.
Where the emphasis sits
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.
Who it is for
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.