The World Green Building Council (WorldGBC), in collaboration with its global Green Building Council network, has launched a powerful new digital tool designed to help policymakers evaluate and strengthen their national climate action plans.
The tool highlights where further efforts are needed to accelerate the decarbonization of the built environment and increase resilience — key to achieving global 2030 climate targets.
COP30: A crucial moment for climate commitments
The upcoming COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, will be a critical juncture for global climate progress. Countries are expected to submit updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) — national climate action plans under the Paris Agreement that define emissions reduction pathways.
To remain on track for the 1.5ºC target, global emissions must be reduced by 42 percent by 2030. However, current national commitments remain far from adequate. Present NDCs put the world on course for a temperature rise of 2.6–3.1ºC this century.
Despite a February 2024 deadline for revised submissions, only 23 of the 195 countries have submitted new NDCs. At COP30, these commitments — and the policies behind them — will face heightened global scrutiny.
Buildings sector: A major contributor
The buildings and construction sector is responsible for 32 percent of global energy consumption and 34 percent of CO₂ emissions.
While 81 percent of NDCs mention buildings, just 18 percent include quantified targets, and only 16 percent outline funding strategies, revealing a significant gap between ambition and action. This disconnect signals both a challenge and a vast opportunity for transformation within the built environment.
Buildings: From climate risk to climate solution
Buildings are essential to daily life and economic resilience, making them a critical focus for climate action. Stronger, more detailed NDCs can catalyze sustainable change — attracting investment, closing financing gaps, creating green jobs, improving energy security, lowering household energy bills, and accelerating national decarbonization. The NDCs submitted in 2025 will help shape climate policy and investment priorities for the next decade.
NDC Scorecard for Sustainable Buildings
In response to this urgent need, WorldGBC and its network have launched the NDC Scorecard for Sustainable Buildings, a digital tool designed to support governments and stakeholders in:
- Identifying best-practice building policy measures for inclusion in NDCs and national climate frameworks
- Assessing how a country’s current NDCs, policies, and regulations align with those measures
- Facilitating collaboration between policymakers and the building industry
- Supporting the development of national decarbonisation roadmaps, with GBCs serving as facilitators
The tool is intended to serve as both a diagnostic instrument and a platform for coordinated action between now and COP30.
A global, collaborative development process
The Scorecard was co-developed by WorldGBC and five pilot Green Building Councils in Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Nigeria, and the Philippines. It was also shaped by input from a broader coalition of 40 organisations, including industry stakeholders and international experts, to ensure global relevance while prioritising local context.
The framework of the tool is built around eight unanimously agreed policy categories:
- Enabling Environment
- Carbon and Energy
- Adaptation and Resilience
- Circularity
- Water
- Biodiversity and Nature
- Health and Wellbeing
- Equity and Access
Next steps: Raising building ambition ahead of COP30
WorldGBC urges governments and climate leaders to use the Scorecard in the months leading up to COP30. With the buildings sector central to emissions reduction, embedding robust building policies into NDCs is essential to aligning national plans with the Paris Agreement and driving transformative change.
Cristina Gamboa, CEO, World Green Building Council, said: “Alongside our network of more than 75 Green Building Councils and their 48,000 private sector and government members, we have been through a journey of growth — and we’ve learned that to achieve true sustainable transformation, after the global consensus must come local action and implementation.
“And we are now in that era of implementation. In this spirit, the NDC Scorecard for Sustainable Buildings has been created to identify the policy gaps and opportunities for governments and industry. We are hoping to mobilise a clear and coordinated government response ahead of COP30 to #BeBoldOnBuildings, which means scaling the sustainable building solutions that work in line with the Global Stocktake.”
“The ultimate responsibility of policymakers is to their people. This scorecard enables dialogue and collaboration with their national GBCs to implement bold building policies, and actionable solutions, that can improve people’s livelihoods and reduce the rate of climate change,” Gamboa added.
