Sustainable Building Policies

Despite the energy-saving potential identified in buildings, few policy measures manage to address the complexity of economic and implementation barriers to improving the energy efficiency of the existing buildings. This project focuses on how national governments can improve their sustainable building policies so as to increase feasible, cost-efficient and legitimate carbon reductions in the building stock.

The objectives of the project are to research how energy savings from the existing buildings could be achieved by either by improving the energy efficiency of the thermal fabric and/or by reducing the energy demand with behavioural change, and what kind of policy instruments can most effectively support this. It is based on comparative policy analysis and quantitative impact assessment of specific policy instruments, such as the German Energy Saving Regulations (EnEV) or the Energy Performance Certificates (EPC) of the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD).