Assessment of Digital Tools for Climate Change Mitigation in the Built Environment: Early Insights from IEA EBC Annex 89

Abstract In light of the urgent need for climate change mitigation in the construction and real estate sectors, it is crucial to implement effective measures that will drive meaningful progress. Digital tools that support the assessment of buildings’ whole-life carbon emissions play a key role in this effort. However, the successful implementation of these tools relies on their effective and efficient use by various stakeholder groups, each of which has different decision-making needs and workflows. Notably, integrating diverse perspectives into tool quality and service, particularly those of users and developers, remains an under-explored area. This study presents key findings from an international survey conducted across participating countries as part of the IEA EBC Annex 89 project, which focuses on implementing net-zero whole-life carbon buildings. The survey, which is part of a broader set of Annex activities, maps existing tools and analyses aspects such as their capabilities (e.g. the environmental indicators assessed by the tool), information management (e.g. databases) and practical integration (e.g. the format of the data output). This paper presents the survey methodology and focuses on analysing a subset of the results in order to evaluate whether current tools meet the needs of stakeholders and address the challenges of integrating them into design and decision-making processes.