Our built environment shapes our daily lives. In the next decade, Europe’s built environment as much as our society will need to go through an important transformation towards climate neutrality, while being challenged by a series of interconnected crises. Climate change is projected to bring frequent droughts, rising sea levels, floods and other extreme weather events which threaten the very fabric of our buildings and other key infrastructure.
At the same time, urbanisation trends project that a majority of the population will be concentrated in urban centres in the next decade. Facing these challenges, the European Union has put the building sector at the heart of its climate neutrality transition. In 2020, the European Green Deal set an actionable framework to respond to these challenges by making Europe more resilient, resource-efficient, just and competitive with the goal of becoming the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.
The new European Commission coming in office in 2024 has re-emphasised, among other things, the need to address today’s housing and energy poverty crises: an objective closely linked to transforming our built environment towards a more sustainable and climate neutral one while ensuring better and more affordable houses for Europeans.
This policy brief outlines the major challenges associated with the transformation of European building stock from local governments and authorities’ perspective, in addition to discussing current legislation in place. The brief will then present suggestions to address these challenges and turn the EU building stock from a major roadblock to a driving force for a climate-neutral, fair and sustainable future.