The Road Back

The first step is for you to help tighten the Building Regulations’ climate requirements for 2027 which are negotiated in the coming months.

“The Road Back” builds on the latest climate science, including UNEP’s 2026 report “Limiting Overshoot”, which stresses that every fraction of a degree and every year above 1.5°C matter to maintain climate stability and functioning ecosystems.

“The Road Back” marks a shift in the building industry from assessing individual buildings to understanding the development of the entire Danish building stock with a Building Stock Model. It connects the existing building stock with scenarios for new construction, renovation, transformation, demolition, energy and material use, allowing the industry’s cumulative emissions, climate debt and temperature contribution to be assessed towards 2100.

The scenarios are structured around a mitigation hierarchy: Avoid, Reduce and Restore. Avoid addresses the need for new construction through better use of existing buildings; Reduce lowers the impact of necessary activity through technology, material choices, reuse and efficiency; and Restore addresses the remaining climate debt after opportunities to avoid and reduce impacts have been pursued.

The results show the scale of the challenge. The baseline shows that if the building industry continues its current course, the modelled temperature contribution reaches an alarming 2.9 °C by 2100. This scenario includes technological development in material production. Slower technological development in material production increases this to 3.5 °C. Combining Avoid and Reduce lowers the contribution to 2.2 °C but still leaves substantial climate debt. Only when these strategies are combined with additional restoration through establishing and conserving nature does the modelled pathway peak at around 1.9 °C and return to 1.5 °C by 2100.

The report therefore reframes the building industry’s transition: from reducing the footprint of individual buildings to transforming the building stock as a whole; limiting climate debt and taking responsibility for the impacts that remain. Restoration is not a substitute for rapid reductions, but a necessary complement on the path back towards climate stability and functioning ecosystems.