What you are looking at
The explorer shows modelled greenhouse gas emissions of the European building stock from 2020 to 2050, counting the whole life cycle: the emissions of making and replacing the materials, of construction, renovation and demolition, and of operating the buildings. Six predefined policy scenarios are built in, and you can define your own.
- Pick a scenario. Six are predefined, from business-as-usual to high diffusion of every strategy across all Member States, with optimistic and conservative readings of current and additional policy in between.
- Or build one. Custom scenarios set how far each
strategy package spreads, grouped as Avoid (circularity
measures, less space per capita), Shift (low-carbon and
bio-based solutions) and Improve (better materials, lower
operational emissions). Each has four setpoints: none, half and full
implementation of what a Member State is assessed as capable of, and
max, which assumes high diffusion everywhere regardless. - Compare two side by side. Any scenario against any other.
- Break the result down. By country, EU region, building type and subtype, element class, material class, stock activity, life cycle stage or life cycle module.
- Change the indicator. Total, fossil, biogenic and land-use global warming potential, or material mass, each as a total or per square metre of floor area or per head of population.
- Take the result with you. Any view downloads as an image or a spreadsheet, and the address bar carries the full state of the view, so a particular comparison can be linked to.
Where the numbers come from
Not from this tool. The explorer is a way of reading results that were modelled elsewhere: building-level life cycle assessment from the SLiCE model and building stock projections from the PULSE model, combined into 4096 scenarios covering the twenty-seven EU Member States. That modelling, and what it concludes, is published as Context-specific life cycle emissions pathways for EU buildings and construction in Nature Communications.
That paper is the one to read if you want to know whether a number here is trustworthy, and the one to cite if you use the numbers. This page is where you look at them.
Both came out of Analysis of Life-cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals of EU Buildings and Construction, a study contracted by the European Commission, DG GROW, under GROW/2022/OP/0005, and carried out by Ramboll with BPIE, KU Leuven, TU Graz, Aalborg University, Politecnico di Milano and IIASA.
Using and reusing it
- The tool is open source. Apache-2.0, at github.com/mroeck/wlc-scenario-explorer. It will read any scenario results following the SLiCE tabular format, not only these, and it degrades gracefully: give it a dataset missing some attributes and it offers fewer breakdowns rather than failing.
- The software is citable in its own right. The paper describing it, its DOI and the full author list are on its publication page.
- It is a dashboard, built for a wide screen. On a phone the frame above will be cramped; the tool is easier to use in a full window.