Next steps

Following the completing of the NDC Scorecard for your country, use this page to help inform the prioritisation of sustainable built environment policies for advocacy and implementation.

Prioritising country-level policy intervention

Countries may not be able to act immediately on every policy gap that is identified using the NDC Scorecard and most countries will want to prioritise fewer policy measures for implementation, due to human or financial capacity. Guidance on how best to prioritise action in these policy areas should ultimately be decided at country-level. However, the following guidance is offered to support a more action-orientated dialogue.

On the basis that a country’s NDC outlines how it plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to help meet the global goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C and adapt to the impacts of climate change, and that the NDC’s link directly to the Paris Agreement it is appropriate to first prioritise policies which link most directly to climate change. In the Scorecard the categories most likely to deliver direct greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions are energy and carbon, and circularity. The adaptation and resilience category deals with the impacts from climate change.

NDCs can address and support development beyond mitigating the impacts of climate change. They can also make the case for development, investment, sector-based transition (e.g. green energy transition), protection and enhancement of biodiversity, engagement of communities and social inclusion more broadly.

Good NDCs are not only plans for countries to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change, but can unlock opportunities that benefit economies, create jobs, reduce inequalities and improve public health.

Country-level dialogue should inform the order in which other policy areas are tackled. Your decision making might be informed by factors including your country baseline, for example:

• Is your country particularly biodiverse, or suffering from rapid decline of biodiversity? Do you need to focus on nature?
• How quickly is your country growing, and how is the built environment changing as a result? Do you need to focus on circularity?
• Will the transition driven by your NDC and wider policy be equitable? Do you need to focus on equity and access?
• What wider health benefits could be driven by your NDC and wider policy agenda? Would a clear focus on health and wellbeing be beneficial?

You will notice overlap between and across the categories and policy measures, and often all of the categories will be important to consider and act on. Still, you may need to make some choices. You can choose how many policy areas in the scorecard you want to address, in what order and when.

Once settled on the policy categories that are most important for your country, you will then need to think about the policy outcomes you want to achieve and the policy measures which help you drive towards those outcomes. Again, this should be guided by a robust understanding of your country’s environmental, infrastructure, regulatory and governance baseline.

The policy measures presented in the NDC Scorecard are listed in an order that supports policy prioritisation across the eight categories – to promote lower cost, more impactful actions first, working towards the more challenging interventions overtime. However, this should ultimately be guided by your locally-determined priorities.

Test in your local dialogue whether there is any reason why these hierarchies should be overridden in your country. For example:

• if your country has a high incidence of informal / unsafe settlements or a rapidly growing population there might be a development drive promoting building of new sustainable homes and buildings (i.e. build nothing might not be an option),
• if your country has an abundant source renewable energy feeding into your electrical grid (i.e. your nation energy mix is dominated by hydro power such as Brazil) then it may not make sense to promote local deployment of renewables?
• if your population and country is not growing (e.g. Japan) and this is leading to a slowing of development of new buildings and infrastructure then embodied carbon / circularity might be less of a policy focus.

Several studies ^[1],[2],[3] have attempted to estimate the GHG savings potential of various policies at a regional level. In aggregating country data into regional data, a lot of the country-specific characteristics, constraints and opportunities, are lost in the presentation but that data still provides a guide as to the potential for different policy outcomes. The table below provides indicative ranges for GHG reduction by 2030 and 2050 for six world regions, based on analysis conducted by Assemble and Arup. This modelling considered policy measures such as those outlined in the energy and carbon category of the WorldGBC NDC Scorecard for Sustainable Buildings and may support users of the Scorecard in prioritising policy interventions at the country level.

Table 1: Emission reduction potential of policy outcomes regionally by 2030 and 2050, relative to a 2022 baseline (Energy and Carbon) 

Using the outcome of your completed NDC Scorecard, and this guide, we invite you to prioritise the next steps for your country’s NDC into a succinct policy call to action document.

<sup>[1] Cabeza, L. F., Q. Bai, P. Bertoldi, J.M. Kihila, A.F.P. Lucena, É. Mata, S. Mirasgedis, A. Novikova, Y. Saheb. (2022). Buildings. In IPCC. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

[2] UNFCCC. (2021). Compendium on Greenhouse Gas Baselines and Monitoring: Building and Construction Sector.

[3] Assemble Alliance and Arup (2024) Pathway Analysis of the Built Environment Transformation.</sup>