Aarhus 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. 2025