GBDI Global Building Data Initiative (Pilot)

Context

Building life cycle assessment has been done tens of thousands of times. Very little of it is comparable, and almost none of it is public. Every benchmark study starts by assembling its own dataset, which is why benchmarks disagree and why most countries still have none.

Insights

• Built an open data commons. A structured, openly licensed database of resource use and upfront embodied carbon for new buildings, designed so entries from different countries and tools can sit side by side.
• Agreed the minimum. What has to be recorded for a building assessment to be comparable with another - scope, units, reference area, data quality.
• Made contribution possible. Routes for national teams, researchers and industry to add their own data rather than only consume someone else’s.

Impact

GBDI outgrew the project that started it. It is now an association under Austrian law with its own governance, and it continues as a standing initiative rather than a funded piece of work.

In October 2026 it became a founding member of CLEAR, the Coalition for Life cycle Emissions Alignment and Reporting, convened by RICS to quantify where the leading carbon assessment methods diverge and then harmonise them. That work addresses the problem the database runs into from the other side: an open data commons is only as useful as the comparability of what goes into it.

More at gbdi.io.