Dr. Josephina Lindblom:

I thank the committee for inviting me. I work at the European Commission's Directorate General for the Environment, in a unit relating to circularity and sustainable production and consumption. Circularity and life cycle thinking are very important in the building sector. If we consider the full life cycle of buildings in the EU, this sector is responsible for about half of all our extracted materials and half our total energy consumption. A third of our total generated waste is construction and demolition waste. Up to now, the focus of the EU, as well as national building policies, has been on energy performance during the use phase of the building, that is, the energy used for heating and cooling buildings. In order to actually decarbonise the building stock, one must look at the full life cycle and minimise the so-called whole-life carbon that we have heard of. This means we should also consider what happens before and after we use our buildings. We must ask ourselves this question: what if, in order to make our buildings more energy-efficient, we use a lot of materials in an inefficient way? That comes with its own carbon cost. What if that so-called embodied carbon is of such quantity that you will have to use the building in a very energy-efficient way for 20, 30 or even 40 years before that initial carbon cost is paid off? What if we are renovating our existing buildings to become more energy-efficient in such a way that, at the end of the life of those buildings, the insulation cannot be separated from the concrete so all the material ends up in landfill as opposed to being recycled?

This is largely the current situation. We therefore need modern policy that acknowledges and makes use of circularity and life cycle thinking to reach our climate targets. This will help us to do so in a much more cost efficient way. The European Commission has developed a common language to assess and report on the sustainability performance of buildings. We call this framework Level(s). It includes whole-life carbon and indicators which help a beginner to get on track to assess broader carbon emissions. In the past year, we started to use Level(s) as a basis for circularity and life cycle thinking in a range of policy initiatives and legislative proposals.

The energy performance of buildings directive is the key building performance legislation in the EU. The proposal for its revision includes the requirement to assess and report on whole life carbon for new buildings. It takes life cycle thinking into account, while setting out legislation for a decarbonised building stock. Being a directive, which is under negotiation, it sets minimum requirements but it gives freedom to member states to have a higher level of ambition in their own legislation. Several EU member states are moving ahead in this area. They understand that this is the most cost-efficient way of decreasing carbon emissions. They refer to whole-life carbon in national legislation and make reporting on it part of their permissions process. Some also set limits as well as requiring reporting. They set out a process of how to tighten these for the future.

I stress that this is considered to be very positive by the European Commission. Linked to the energy performance of buildings directive and the requirement to report on whole-life carbon performance of buildings, I also note it will be mandatory to report the relevant data about the carbon performance of the construction products, that is, the material used for the building under the revised construction products regulation, which was adopted by the Commission a few weeks ago. We are doing it at both the building and product levels, so we are all moving in the same direction.

I want to comment on sustainable finance and its taxonomy, which is important in this regard. This initiative targets private investments and sets out criteria that need to be fulfilled to define the investment as sustainable. There is a requirement to assess and report on whole life carbon for new buildings to be considered as a sustainable investment. In all these policy initiatives, the indicators in the Level(s) framework are used as a basis to bring in whole-life carbon. This framework allows governments to have a structured way to introduce requirements in their own legislation. I mentioned that other member states are moving ahead and are doing so while basing themselves on the Level(s) framework. The Commission looks at this as a highly positive development. I strongly encourage the committee to consider this in its work.