The need to implement sustainable development (SD) in the construction industry has given birth to the green building (GB) movement. GB is a promising construction approach through which the construction industry contributes to SD. However, the adoption of GB has been hampered in many parts of the world by numerous barriers. To date, no attention has been paid to the need to review existing knowledge of barriers affecting GB adoption. This paper presents a systematic review of literature on barriers to GB adoption published in academic journals.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Energy Codes Program (BECP) periodically evaluates national and state-level impacts associated with energy codes in residential and commercial buildings. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), funded by DOE, conducted an assessment of the prospective impacts of national model building energy codes from 2010 through 2040. A previous PNNL study evaluated the impact of the Building Energy Codes Program; this study looked more broadly at overall code impacts.

Developed as a common EU framework of core indicators for the sustainability of office and residential buildings, Level(s) provides a set of indicators and common metrics for measuring the environmental performance of buildings along their life cycle. As well as environmental performance, which is the main focus, it also enables other important related aspects of the performance of buildings to be assessed using indicators for health and comfort, life cycle cost and potential future risks to performance.

The ABRACADABRA project is developing a toolkit, targeting policy makers, with a focus on regulatory challenges and opportunities for boosting energy retrofitting of buildings. For this purpose, the project will investigate regulatory issues, as well as available good practices, in the project’s target countries (Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Romania, Spain, and the Netherlands).

Retrofitting has been proposed as a method to significantly reduce energy consumption and emission derived from the housing sector. Having said this it remains clear that severe restraints remain; and the concept of a “one solution fits all” is at the very least unrealistic. As it has been repeatedly supported via the Abracadabra project any potential solution must deal with significantly complex issues at technical, legislative and regulatory levels, and of course at financial and economic levels.

In a prior study entitled “Mapping of Existing Energy Efficiency Standards and Technologies in Buildings in the UNECE Region”, the UN Committee on Housing and Land Management (CHLM) and the Committee on Sustainable Energy (CSE) commissioned a comparative study on building standards in the UNECE region. The current report follows up on this by analyzing the actual prevalence of specific types of energy-efficient technologies in the buildings sector in the UNECE region, along with the levels and types of public policy interventions supporting their implementations.

Building energy efficiency has been identified as a cost-effective opportunity to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and a variety of policies are being implemented to harvest this efficiency potential. However, there are growing concerns about a gap between predicted or expected energy consumption levels in buildings and the actual measured energy consumption in operation, both at an individual building level as well as in the building sector as a whole.

The purpose of this study was to complete a literature review of the economic assessment of the costs, benefits and methods for the construction of houses that are designed and built to standards that exceed the minimum requirements as defined by the Building Code. The scope included international and local assessments, academic and grey literature and industry material such as facts sheets. Key findings Many studies focused on energy savings as the sole benefit.