Building Transition: financing market transformation

This report focuses on unlocking funding to decarbonise the 75% of lower-performing buildings that have not yet adopted green building practices.

Buildings account for over 30% of global energy use and more than a quarter of carbon emissions. Most existing buildings will still be standing in 2050, so large-scale capital investment will be needed to undertake sustainable retrofits to meet climate targets. Building Transition is a call to action. It aims to demonstrate how investment can be unlocked for the mass market by attracting capital to the underperforming majority of existing buildings, bringing them up to modern sustainability standards.

Key recommendations

Building Transition identifies a critical gap in the industry – while high-performing buildings have access to green finance and resources, most buildings are locked out due to a lack of capital. The report offers key recommendations to address this challenge:

Policy and taxonomy reform: developing stronger policies and taxonomies that direct finance toward underperforming buildings, and performance-oriented criteria tailored to diverse building types, so that investment reaches all buildings.
Global decarbonisation standards: defining a credible decarbonisation transition and providing common standards, metrics, and decarbonisation tools that can be used in different geographies.
Resilience in finance: incorporating adaptation and resilience in real estate finance to account for the impacts of both acute and chronic climate events. Currently, this is not common practice in real estate finance, and lack of resilience makes lower-performing buildings, the “other 75%,” more vulnerable to becoming stranded assets and suffering from climate impacts.

The guide was produced by an international alliance comprising BRE, the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA), the Singapore Green Building Council (SGBC), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and Alliance HQE-GBC France.

It builds on the earlier report Financing Transformation: A Guide to Green Building for Green Bonds and Green Loans, which outlined how green building certifications – such as BREEAM, LEED, Green Star, Green Mark, and HQE – can set the benchmark for sustainable investments.

Jane Goddard, Deputy CEO of BRE

“At BRE, we believe that scalable, context-specific solutions—backed by robust data, strong policies, and global standards—are key to transforming the built environment and meeting the urgent challenges of climate change.”

– Jane Goddard, Deputy CEO of BRE

Read the report

"Bridging the gap between high-performing and underperforming buildings is essential to achieving our global decarbonization goals. This report underlines the importance of inclusive investment strategies that unlock capital for the majority of buildings, ensuring that no part of the built environment is left behind."