Buildings Breakthrough
The Buildings Breakthrough, launched at COP28 and co-led by France and Morocco, set itself the target of making near-zero emission and resilient buildings the global norm by 2030. This final report is the answer to the obvious question that follows: what counts as one. Coordinated by the UNEP hosted GlobalABC Secretariat and led by the World Green Building Council, it consolidates a shared definition, a framework of indicators and metrics, and policy guidance for the governments that have to put it into regulation.
Authors / institution
Buildings Breakthrough: GlobalABC Secretariat (UNEP) & World Green Building Council
Published
2026
What the report settles
A near-zero emission and resilient building, in the report's definition, is highly energy efficient, keeps greenhouse gas emissions across its whole life cycle to a minimum, and protects its users and its value against the hazards it can expect. Around that definition the report sets out eleven building blocks: operational emissions, energy efficiency, low-carbon energy, refrigerants, upfront and end-of-life embodied emissions, sufficiency, and the resilience assessments. Each one comes with guiding principles rather than a single global threshold, which is the point: the framework has to work in every climate and every regulatory system.
Indicators governments can legislate
The second half turns the definition into numbers: energy use in kWh per square metre and year, emissions in kg CO2e per square metre, resilience through hazard specific assessments, each linked to the standards and certification systems that already exist. The policy chapter then groups recommendations into the enabling environment, carbon and energy, and adaptation, covering planning law, financing, capacity building and research.
Why we are reading it
Embodied emissions are treated as a first-class part of the definition, not as a footnote to operational energy. And the methodological recommendations ask countries to define GWP 100 total, GWP 100 fossil and biogenic carbon content separately, with a stated accounting period and an explicit treatment of time dependent variables. That is precisely the accounting frame a timber building needs in order to show what it holds.
The report stops short of the next step. It asks for biogenic carbon to be reported, not for long-term removal in a load-bearing structure to be credited, and it names no material. Anyone looking for a case for timber will not find it here. What they will find is the measurement architecture that such a case has to fit into.
Full title: Near-Zero Emission and Resilient Buildings: Shared Definitions, Indicators, Frameworks and Policy Guidance for Implementation. 56 pages. Builds on the 2025 Interim Report, which established the definition and guiding principles.
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