The world’s green building councils have published a series of private sector commitments aimed at producing massive carbon savings from buildings and construction to coincide with Buildings Day at the COP21 global climate conference in Paris.
Alongside the pledges, the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction – which includes WorldGBC – was launched. This alliance has been established to encourage coordination and partnerships between global organisations working on buildings and construction, and to help countries meet their intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) through green building.
Commitments made for Buildings Day included:
- Corporate pledges from more than 50 businesses operating in the UK, and over 100 globally, committing to play their part in delivering the necessary carbon reductions. UK Green Building Council members making corporate pledges on carbon include The Crown Estate, Marks & Spencer, British Land, LendLease, Land Securities, Derwent, Argent and Kingfisher
- All 74 national green building councils, under the umbrella of the World Green Building Council, committed to driving net zero carbon new building and large scale energy efficient refurbishment of the existing building stock in order to play their role in limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees
- Green building councils around the world are committed to register, renovate or certify over 1.25bn sq m of green building space and train more than 127,000 green building professionals by 2020.
