Many citizens, particularly in nascent green building markets, make suboptimal decisions in the design and construction choices for renovation approaches and new home purchases due to a fear of bank financing. Borrowing sufficiently to bring forward necessary resources to build homes properly both reduces citizens’ “Total Cost of Monthly Ownership” (loan payment plus energy, health and repair costs) while unlocking a critical increase of construction budgets facilitating ownership of the greenest, high-quality homes. Financing Green Homes with the borrower subject to lower monthly operating costs is less risky to banks which provide discounted credit without harming profits. The SMARTER project effectively communicates the benefits of Green Homes to citizens and other key stakeholders to bring a systemic solution to a systemic problem that inhibits the financial industry to design and offer green finance products and the citizens to understand and request them. SMARTER replicates a successful “Green Homes and Green Mortgage” program to 12 new countries, addresses barriers and brings green innovation with relevant research and cluster formation, adapts essential tools for administration and communication, and effectively expands collection of actual energy and financial performance to improve risk analysis with local data. Public investment is leveraged and ambitious green EU targets are supported as banks, developers, and green solution providers all contribute budgets to increase private financing for building exemplary homes. The SMARTER “Green Homes Investment Platform” guides new programs to a suitably ambitious, common definition of green investments and facilitates institutional investment by collaborating with ongoing initiatives including EeMAP and EEFIG; aligning with EC objectives such as “Mainstreaming Energy Efficiency Finance” and advancing the Financial, Technical and Behavioral de-risking championed by “Smart Finance for Smart Buildings".

Reincarnate aims at enabling the European construction industry to significantly reduce construction and demolition waste (CDW) by providing a circular potential assessment information model platform (CP-IM) and a set of innovations to make use of the CP-IM. The CP-IM will provide a digital representation of building materials and products with life-cycle information and prediction methods for tracing and predicting the lifetime of a products / material. The CP-IM will also allow for assessing the potential for lifetime extension and reuse and possibilities to predict circular value flows. Based on the CP-IM REINCARNATE will develop and demonstrate ten innovations that use CP-IM data, ranging from innovations for building inspection, to solutions for planning construction and dismantling, to automatically identifying and sorting CDW, to decision support tools for architects and real estate managers. The innovations will draw upon emerging digital technologies, such as digital twin representation, artificial intelligence, and robotic automation. REINCARNATE will also develop detailed social science insights about the social adoption behavior existing in the wider construction industry that will allow for understanding how a wide realization within the industry can be established that building products and materials can be reincarnated and re-used in high product quality. All innovations will be demonstrated on five selected demonstrators. Business process guidelines, an online learning platform with training materials and proposals for standards will be developed to additional foster widespread dissemination and exploitation of the REINCARNATE results. The REINCARNATE consortium combines 16 partners from different EU member countries and Hong Kong with strong expertise in digital twins, lifecycle prediction, material assessment, social sciences, construction management, architecture, and real estate management.

BUILD UPON2 proposes to address one of the main barriers stopping proper public management, and consequent upscaling of Deep Energy Efficiency Renovation: the lack of an adequate, widely shared Impact Framework. Buildings are one of the biggest contributors to climate change in Europe and account for over 40% of the EU’s final energy demand and 36% of CO2 emissions. To meet EU’s energy efficiency targets for 2020 and 2030 and long-term goal under the revised EPBD to decarbonise it’s building stock by 2050, renovation becomes crucial, and its rate needs to increase to at least 2-3% per annum. National Renovation Strategies under the EED aimed to accelerate the rate of renovation, however these have not proved effective. The 2018 recast of the EPBD strengthens the role of these Strategies and obliges MS to set out a roadmap to decarbonised building stock by 2050, supported by a suite of measurable progress indicators and milestones. BUILD UPON2 proposes to work with local, national and European stakeholders to create a Multi-Level Renovation Impact Framework that contains a suite of milestones and measurable progress indicators for building renovation strategies, integrating data and insights from the city level. This Framework will serve as a tool for Cities in delivering the EPBD and ensure that local initiatives are aligned with national and European policies. A methodology will be developed to indicate how the Framework reporting system can be integrated into Sustainable Energy Actions Plans (SECAPs), how to use the Framework and how data to support the indicators will be collected and used. The Framework will be tested with 8 pilot cities and the results of this testing phase will be used to update the Framework and create policy recommendations, ensuring that the Framework can be replicated across Europe and help local, regional and national authorities deliver on European energy efficiency goals. The Project Consortium ascertains a successful delivery.