We spend a great amount of our time in buildings – be it for education, work or simply being at home. But buildings are also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. According to the UN, over one third of global energy use and associated emissions are linked to buildings. As a response, many countries have put in place policies to reduce building-related emissions. But what do we know about such efforts?

This paper examined systems that track policy developments in the building sector, from the international to the national level. The governance of policies in the building sector follows a broader trend in (international) climate policy making in focusing on monitoring and evaluation as a key means of following policy impact. Monitoring, or the routine collection of data on public policies by the means of indicators, is thought to produce regular, critical knowledge to support policy development by enabling reflection and learning over time. The monitoring that we have examined fulfills two basic tasks: it provides a historical record of the emissions, and it presents mainly ex ante estimates of future emissions.  Based on the results, policy monitoring can initiate pressure to act, especially if monitoring data demonstrates that desired outcomes will likely fail to materialize.

Conceptually and drawing on relevant literature on policy monitoring and evaluation, we argue that successful policy monitoring systems come with eight desirable characteristics: The system should (1) provide an operational interpretation of policies and measures to be clear about what’s being monitored and how; (2) the system should take stock of all policies in a particular domain, such as building policies; (3) they should provide qualitative descriptions to understand the policies and their context, supply (4) quantitative indicators to assess cumulative effect and where possible the contribution of individual policies to, for example, emissions reductions. Successful monitoring systems should furthermore assess (5) interactions and aggregate impacts in order to not only gain knowledge about individual policies and instruments, but also learn about their cumulative effects as part of a broader policy mix; (6) generate sufficiently frequent monitoring information to support policy-making; (7) be sufficiently durable to persist over time and yet flexible to make necessary adjustments; and (8) be sufficiently politically justified to enable requisite resources flows for the activity without undue political interference.

Empirically, we begin with the United Nations level – which through the Paris Agreement and other institutional setups specify the basic, international framework for monitoring and reporting. This is necessary in order to gain a worldwide overview of policy activity and progress. The European Union (EU), in turn, implements monitoring obligations within its jurisdiction, but is also an active policy-maker in the building sector itself, for example through the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive that must be implemented by the EU Member States in their own legislation. Individual Member States such as Finland and Germany – the Member State focus of our article – follow EU-directives but may also add their own approaches and rules as long as they meet the baseline requirements of the EU legislation. The Member States track the developments of their building stocks and the influence of policies on them and report onward to the EU and ultimately the United Nations. As a result, a complex mesh of building-related monitoring has emerged.

Set against our criteria, we found that the overall monitoring efforts have progressed on each level. While providing a clear operational interpretation of policies and measures remains a challenge, especially to enable cumulative and comparative work, most systems do take stock of a great range of policies by providing both qualitative and quantitative data. However, we also detected notable differences: While for example Finland reported 17 policy instruments in the building sector, Germany had only six. Furthermore, the expectations both countries report in terms of driving emissions reductions in the building sector also differ: While Finland expects about three quarters of its emissions reductions to come from building regulations, in Germany the lion’s share of emissions reductions is thought to emerge from various funding and subsidy schemes to incentivize building owners to act, flanked by tax incentives, the CO₂ price and regulation. The task of the monitoring and reporting systems should therefore be to allow all actors to gain a better understanding of the governance approach and the mix of policies that affects the building sector.

That said, certain aspects remain difficult to see in the existing data. For example, Germany did not quantify a range of instruments because their contribution was thought to be fairly insignificant or impossible to quantify. The difference between Germany and Finland may therefore in part be related to actual differences in policy, but the number of instruments reported may also differ due to diverging monitoring approaches and methodological choices.

Information on interactions and aggregate impacts has over time started to emerge in monitoring systems, as for the example the European Union allowed reporting of bundles of policy instruments starting in 2013. Interactions also appear in certain coefficients to calculate emissions. It is also worth noting that instruments that have not been quantified may still contribute in important, if indirect ways, to emissions reductions in the building sector. For example, changes in spatial and urban planning regulation may have indirect impacts on buildings and their emissions by, for example, fostering the installation of renewables or disincentivizing the use of fossil fuels for heating. Such interactions are not readily visible from the available monitoring data so far.

Although there are efforts to standardize monitoring, different details in the methodological approaches and the policy’s applicability means that not all monitoring data are readily comparable. For example, there are no common rules or guidelines on which policies countries should quantify and how, suggesting room for further improvement of guidance and practice. Finally, there are issues of scope. For example, embodied emissions from buildings have too often been neglected in policy and their monitoring – a gap that looms large with a view to future net zero targets.

Taken together, even in generally advanced and in many ways leading jurisdictions like the EU, Finland and Germany, policy monitoring in the building sector remains work in progress. This work will need to speed up as climate policies focus increasing attention on emission caused by the building sector. Future policy development for low carbon societies needs especially reliable means to track the impacts of policy mixes.

Image credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/crane-construction-crane-load-crane-325038/