Building design standards

The Climate Action Strategy has established a Building Design Standards project to minimise emissions across the full lifecycle of a building, from design through to construction and onwards. 

The City of London Corporation is committed to ensuring that all future building work meets the highest commercially viable sustainability standards to help us achieve net zero by 2040 throughout the Square Mile.

We recognise that the choices we make in the design and construction of our buildings have climate impacts, even before the construction phase and can reduce the need to retrofit buildings at a later date. Some materials emit more carbon than others, known as 'embodied carbon' and demonstrates the careful consideration that should be taken with material selection.

We will minimise lifecycle emissions by:

• Developing standards for use in all refurbishments and new build projects.
• Including consideration of whole life carbon and cost analysis in our standards.
• Using low impact materials and encouraging others to do the same.
• Introducing circular economy principles into the day-to-day activities of the City Corporation, to ease the use of secondary materials and improve resource efficiency throughout the building lifecycle.

We have established a Net Zero and Resilient Buildings Centre of Excellence to drive leadership, best practice, research, support and training to all areas of building decarbonisation and resilience work at the City Corporation.

We have finalised the development of technology and design standards for new builds. These standards will provide project delivery teams, designers and developers with consistent requirements and good practices to apply to the delivery of capital and operationally cost-efficient buildings, facilities and sites with high life-cycle sustainability performance.