GBDI China and India Cooperation Incubator

Context

Most of the floor area of the coming decades will be built in China and India. The data infrastructure for whole life carbon was not built with those markets in mind, and the methods that work in Europe carry assumptions - about material supply, construction practice, grid intensity and building lifespan - that do not travel unexamined.

Objectives

• Building the relationships first. Working with researchers, industry and policy actors in both countries rather than arriving with a finished method.
• Testing what transfers. Which parts of the global building data model hold, and which need rebuilding for local material supply chains and construction practice.
• Feeding it back. What is learned here reshapes the global data commons, rather than being an appendix to it.

Why it matters

A global benchmark derived mostly from European and North American buildings is not a global benchmark. Closing that gap is the difference between data that describes the world and data that describes the part of it that was easy to reach.

Part of the Global Building Data Initiative.