The Carbon-Free City Handbook: Buildings

The Carbon-Free City Handbook: Buildings provides a set of five strategic actions for cities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment, which accounts for nearly 50 percent of all GHG emissions in large cities.

• Cities should perform deep energy retrofits on all city-owned buildings, including affordable housing, to ensure municipal facilities are ultraefficient and net-zero energy ready, meaning they could achieve net-zero or nearly net-zero energy if paired with on-site renewable energy generation.
• Municipalities should implement building code requirements to phase in net-zero energy or net-zero energy ready status for all new buildings, including a requirement that all new municipal buildings achieve net-zero energy.
• Progressive codes should be used to require existing buildings to meet specific energy-efficiency metrics based on whole-building energy consumption per unit area following a "trigger" event, such as a major renovation, building refinancing, or sale.
• Cities should implement policies to support citywide interior lighting upgrades to LED technology, utilizing focused buy-down programs for low-income residents to manage up-front costs and achieve long-term energy and maintenance savings.
• Citywide benchmarking should be required for all buildings to report annual energy use, combined with transparency policies requiring public disclosure of energy use for large residential and commercial building types.

APA

RMI (2017). The Carbon-Free City Handbook: Buildings. https://rmi.org/resources/the-carbon-free-city-handbook-buildings/

Chicago

RMI. The Carbon-Free City Handbook: Buildings. 2017. https://rmi.org/resources/the-carbon-free-city-handbook-buildings/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=The Carbon-Free City Handbook: Buildings |date=7 November 2017 |url=https://rmi.org/resources/the-carbon-free-city-handbook-buildings/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2017carbonfree, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{The Carbon-Free City Handbook: Buildings}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2017}, month = nov, url = {https://rmi.org/resources/the-carbon-free-city-handbook-buildings/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }