TRANSFORMATION TO ZERO SUMMIT PRELIMINARY REPORT-OUT

This preliminary report-out documents the outcomes of the Transformation to Zero Summit held on October 15, 2016. Convened by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), New Buildings Institute (NBI), and Architecture 2030, the summit aimed to establish a roadmap for achieving a zero carbon built environment by 2050 through industry collaboration, policy levers, and investment in building efficiency and renewable energy.

• The summit identified four 'disruptive statements' to guide the transformation of the building sector toward zero carbon by 2050: that the entire building sector can be zero net carbon, the industry can accelerate the renewable energy market, the zero net carbon building industry can change manufacturing, and a zero net carbon economy can promote social justice and resiliency solutions.
• The participants identified several high-priority near-term themes to enable a zero carbon building stock, including the need to incentivize reach codes and standards, generate demand for zero net carbon in markets such as school districts, government stakeholders, and corporate real estate, and shift the scale of engagement from individual buildings to portfolios and programs.
• RMI, NBI, and Architecture 2030 agreed on six primary areas of focus for their future roadmap and collaborations: generating global demand for zero net carbon buildings and materials across specific sectors (including the financial sector and underserved communities), driving a national model for reach codes and standards that include carbon pricing and embodied carbon, developing policy templates for point-of-sale energy upgrades, focusing on workforce training for high-performance retrofits, linking investor risk to performance outcomes, and benchmarking embodied carbon in new construction.
• The organizing entities plan to conduct a gap analysis of their respective activities in building efficiency and carbon reductions to identify critical gaps and new strategic operations necessary to operationalize the summit's outcomes.

APA

RMI (2016). TRANSFORMATION TO ZERO SUMMIT PRELIMINARY REPORT-OUT. https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/TransftoZero_PrelimReportOut_20161202.pdf

Chicago

RMI. TRANSFORMATION TO ZERO SUMMIT PRELIMINARY REPORT-OUT. 2016. https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/TransftoZero_PrelimReportOut_20161202.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=TRANSFORMATION TO ZERO SUMMIT PRELIMINARY REPORT-OUT |date=December 2016 |url=https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/TransftoZero_PrelimReportOut_20161202.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2016transformation, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{TRANSFORMATION TO ZERO SUMMIT PRELIMINARY REPORT-OUT}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2016}, month = dec, url = {https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/TransftoZero_PrelimReportOut_20161202.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }