Analysis of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals of EU Buildings and Construction

Context

Buildings and construction account for roughly 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU, but until recently there was no agreed quantification of how those emissions are distributed across the life cycle of the stock, nor of how different policy choices would change them by 2050. Without that, the revision of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive would have been argued on assertion rather than evidence.

DG GROW commissioned the analysis to close that gap. We led the analytical work: a bottom-up model of the EU27 building stock, built from archetype buildings and harmonised material and energy flow data, run forward to 2050 under a set of policy scenarios, and assembled from open archetypes so that national teams could repeat it rather than start over.

Insights

Embodied emissions are already about half the problem, and rising as a share. As operational performance improves under existing directives, the emissions locked into materials and construction become the dominant term. Any policy that targets only operational energy is aiming at a shrinking fraction.
No single lever is sufficient. Reaching a trajectory consistent with EU climate targets requires radical reduction of operational emissions, a three- to fourfold increase in renovation rates, and material efficiency and decarbonisation of materials, together. Scenarios that pull only one of these levers fall well short.
Removals are real but modest, and contested. Biogenic carbon storage in timber and mineral carbonation can contribute, but the magnitude depends heavily on accounting choices and on assumptions about forest carbon opportunity costs.

Impact

The results informed the evidence base for the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, which now requires whole life carbon disclosure for all new buildings by 2030, and fed into the Commission’s wider work on the EU Taxonomy and construction products.