Building renovation passports

Intervention point

By promoting the widespread adoption of building renovation passports (BRPs), which outline a long-term renovation roadmap to achieve deep renovation for individual buildings, the industry could significantly boost retrofitting rates.

Current situation

Europe’s built environment must undergo major renovations to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, as directed by the European Climate Law. In effect, if the industry is to hit its 2050 target, the current annual deep retrofitting rate of 0.2 percent of existing building stock needs to rise to 2–3 percent.

One way of boosting the renovation rate significantly would be through widespread adoption of BRPs, which are already in use or close to being introduced in several European countries including Belgium, Germany, and France.

These passports can offer a digital logbook of property-level renovations tracking historical and contemporary information about the property as well as a long-term road map that identifies future retrofits and installations to decarbonise the property.

It is certain that reporting requirements for buildings will increase, given the growing public interest in the impact of real estate on the environment. Aided by greater digitisation of data, the BRP will become the most appropriate tool to facilitate asset-level implementation of policy demands, providing major impetus to the retrofitting of European real estate as a whole.

How to get involved

Companies working in the built environment in a handful of EU member states, (Belgium, France and Germany) can already use digital logbooks or passports to start the process of renovation.

Regardless of the legislative constituency of the asset, supplementary initiatives, such as the “materials passport”, can be used now in the strong expectation of their future significance.

For those interested in developing this work further, GlobalABC is a membership-based organisation working on piloting BRPs in several countries to provide blueprints to adopt across the globe. Find out more here.

In the UK, The Green Finance Institute’s Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings (CEEB) is hosting a Building Renovation Passport Working Group.

Interested in finding out more? Click here to download the full technical briefing.

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Last updated: July 2023