The UN Environment Program announced that its program for monitoring commercial and residential energy use and emissions might become a global standard.
UNEP estimates that office buildings and homes are accountable for about 30 percent of global energy consumption. Emissions from buildings are expected to reach 11.1 billion tons per year by 2020, up from 2004 levels of more than 8 billion tons.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is considering using UNEP’s Common Carbon Metric (CCM) as the international monitoring standards for buildings, UNEP announced.
CCM is meant as a common system for defining what level of impact buildings have on the environment. UNEP said that governments could plan their sustainability and emissions targets more effectively through this mechanism.
“Development of the Common Carbon Metric and the ISO’s decision to consider it as an international standard are important steps to remove the barriers to unlock this potential and provide a path to more energy efficiency in the building sector,” Sylvie Lemmet, director of UNEP’s division of technology, industry and economics, said in a statement.
