The housing we need, for the future we want
[ Collaborators ]BPIE - Buildings Performance Institute Europe, VELUX, RISE Regenerative Spatial Systems, Artelia Denmark
A green paper and systems framework on how the building industry can answer four crises at once: climate and biodiversity breakdown, energy and resource insecurity, unaffordable housing, and unhealthy homes. For the first time, the paper treats them as one system. It asks a simple question. What happens when the same interventions are designed to fix all four together?
The findings went further than expected. By using Europe's existing buildings better, the industry could unlock 50 to 107 million additional homes, house up to 250 million more people, avoid up to 19 billion tonnes of CO₂, and prevent up to 13 billion tonnes of material use.
“The future is already here, and it´s beautiful”
The point is this. The building industry is not only part of the problem. It could become one of our strongest responses to it. The paper quantifies the pathway: a sector moving from cause to cure, creating homes, improving health, cutting energy and resource dependency, and lowering emissions through one coordinated set of actions.
A way forward for an industry ready to change its role.
Greenpaper - Sept. 2026[ Links ]Beyond the Roadmap
[ Collaborators ]Artelia, CEBRA, EFFEKT
Beyond the Roadmap is a transition plan for the Danish building industry, developed to answer a simple but difficult question: what comes after reduction when a sector is already operating beyond planetary limits?
The report expands the work of the Reduction Roadmap beyond climate and carbon. It examines the building industry as part of a wider ecological and social system, connecting resource use, land, biodiversity, energy, inequality and economic growth. Rather than improving current practice at the margins, it asks what the industry would need to become if its activities were genuinely aligned with safe and just Earth-system boundaries.
At the centre of the work is the Butterfly Framework: a method for benchmarking progress against absolute climate and ecological limits.
“A transition plan for the Danish building industry”
It combines sufficiency and impact reduction with active restoration, shifting the ambition from doing less harm to helping rebuild the natural systems the industry depends on.
Applied to Denmark, the framework sets out a transition from ecological deficit towards regeneration and explores what this means for construction rates, material use, investment and business models. The result is not a fixed recipe for the future, but a destination and a framework for getting there.
Beyond the Roadmap shows how the building industry can move from being one of the drivers of ecological overshoot to becoming an active part of the solution.
[ Links ]Report- Nov. 2024Re:Living
[ Collaborators ]VELUX Group
Re:Living is an ongoing initiative to transform the building industry from a source of environmental degradation into a net positive restorative force. This collaborative project introduces the first model designed to guide the European building industry back within core system boundaries while enhancing wellbeing for all. Central to this initiative is a systemic reduction of new construction and the repositioning of the industry around the care and reuse of existing buildings.
At the heart of Re:Living is the groundbreaking People and Planet Model, a framework that brings together Earth System Science, which defines the absolute environmental limits required to keep the planet stable, and Building Biology, which defines the absolute conditions people need to thrive inside buildings.
“The housing we need for future we want”
Together, these perspectives form a single, holistic benchmarking model that redefines how we approach building design. Rather than simply reducing harm, this model demonstrates how buildings can actively restore ecosystems, support biodiversity, and enhance human well-being through integrated solutions.
Re:Living proves that our existing building stock can shift from being part of the problem to becoming a powerful solution for planetary health and human flourishing.
[ Links ]Strategy- OngoingAarhus Climate Budget Tool
[ Collaborators ]Artelia Danmark, Aarhus Municipality
Denmark's first decision-making tool that links municipal construction policy directly to a CO₂ budget. It turns climate science into a live governance mechanism, not a retrospective footnote.
Aarhus is the first municipality in Denmark to use a CO₂ budget to steer its construction activity. The tool treats carbon like money: a limited resource to be defined, allocated, and tracked across the entire building portfolio. Every project, new build or renovation, can be measured against Paris-aligned pathways.
“Turning the global carbon budget into a tool for everyday building decision making”
Decision-makers see exactly how today's choices spend down the city's remaining carbon space toward 2050, and what that means for global temperature rise.
Conventional assessments judge single projects after the decision is made. This one governs the whole portfolio, ahead of time. It lets a municipality correct course before climate limits are breached, and find the measures that stretch the budget further.
By operationalizing the global carbon budget at the municipal level, the project brings climate science into the rooms where decisions actually happen, and sets a scalable model for climate-conscious governance across the building sector.
Tool - Mar. 2025Living Places
[ Collaborators ]VELUX, Artelia, Enemærk & Petersen, EFFEKT
The “Living Places” project showcases a transformative approach to housing by demonstrating how homes can be built with 60–75% lower emissions and a threefold improvement in indoor environmental quality, all at market price.
At the time, it achieved the lowest measured building emissions ever recorded. The project combines advanced construction methods, low-emission materials, and a systemic approach designed to ensure economic viability and scalability.
Central to the strategy is the optimization of the entire building lifecycle, from material extraction to end of life, significantly reducing the carbon footprint while maintaining cost efficiency.
Photo Adam Mørk“A new way of thinking about building”
The project also prioritizes healthier indoor environments through natural light, improved air quality, and thermal comfort, setting a new benchmark for residential construction.
Living Places serves as a blueprint for systemic change, proving that major environmental and health improvements are possible within existing economic frameworks.
The full methodology and insights were released open source and published as a book, making the knowledge available to the entire industry. By proving the approach can be scaled and adapted, the project paved the way for wider adoption and challenged the industry to align economic and environmental objectives.
[ Links ]Prototype - OngoingReduction Roadmap
[ Collaborators ]Artelia Danmark, CEBRA, EFFEKT
The Reduction Roadmap is a campaign that, for the first time in Danish history, managed to mobilise an entire industry not to fight regulation, but to demand it.
The campaign proved that real change is possible when we enable collective action for systemic change. It started with a number: the emissions limit Danish construction has to stay within to align with the Paris Agreement and a 1.5°C carbon budget. Then it turned that number into a movement.
Using insight from marketing, branding, behavioral science and neurolinguistic techniques, the campaign got more than 900 companies to sign on, representing the vast majority of the Danish building industry.
“A new way of thinking about building”
All demanding that climate science become binding regulation for everyone. Together, they called for a legally binding cap that adheres to climate science. The logic was simple.
No company can solve this alone. Act alone, and the market punishes you: undercut by competitors still building cheaply and dirtily. But when an industry moves together and demands the same rules for all, the dynamic flips. What made each company vulnerable in isolation became their shared strength. That is what the Reduction Roadmap proved. Collective action can turn climate ambition from a competitive disadvantage into the new baseline.
A determined minority mobilised a whole sector, and that sector made systemic change impossible to ignore. The campaign has already now been adopted to Australia and Sweden, with other countries on it´s way.
[ Links ]Campaign ongoing - OngoingBeyond Duality
[ Collaborators ]Erin Remblance
Beyond Duality is an eight-week learning course for people who want to understand the systems shaping our world, and gain the agency to change them.
It has already been taken by some of the leading pioneers working in sustainability and systems change. This is not a course in sustainability literacy. It is a process of unlearning modernity and remembering ecology.
The course examines the assumptions that shape how we understand nature, economy, progress and ourselves, and rebuilds that understanding around the reality of interconnected systems.
“Unlearning Modernity, Remembering Ecology”
It gives you the frameworks to see beyond dominant narratives, understand how power and impact move through systems, and recognise why so many conventional solutions fail. The purpose is agency and empowerment.
When you understand the system you are part of, you can navigate it differently, make better decisions and intervene where change can actually happen.
Beyond Duality gives you the language, understanding and intellectual footing to move from sensing that something is wrong to knowing how to act on it.
[ Links ]Course - ongoing