At the 2024 UN Climate Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, the Subnational Climate Action Leaders’ Exchange (SCALE) partnership launched the Zero Emissions and Resilient Buildings (ZERB) Accelerator. The ZERB Accelerator will rapidly reduce operational and embodied greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen climate resilience in the buildings sector through enhanced multilevel collaboration with subnational governments around the world. The announcement was made at SCALE’s COP29 Action Dialogue, where subnational leaders explored opportunities for strengthening climate action across key sectors.
The buildings sector is a major contributor to the climate crisis, with building operations and construction accounting for over one-third of global carbon emissions. But slashing emissions isn’t the only priority. Buildings are vulnerable to numerous climate risks — from flooding and rising seas to heat stress, heatwaves, severe storms and fires — meaning there’s also an urgent need to enhance their resilience.
The ZERB Accelerator will bring together a global cohort of cities, states and regions committed to ambitious goals for mitigation and resilience in the buildings sector. SCALE accelerates action toward these goals through its signature multilevel governance approach: strengthening cooperation vertically between national and subnational governments and building horizontal, cross-sector connectivity with a wide range of key stakeholders, such as civil society, multilateral institutions, and research and academic organizations. This fosters political will, informs and empowers key stakeholders, and identifies priorities for additional action and resource mobilization. The ZERB Accelerator builds on the success of the Lowering Organic Waste Methane (LOW-Methane) initiative, launched by SCALE in 2023.
The first subnational jurisdictions to join the ZERB Accelerator include the states of Maryland and Washington in the U.S. and the city of Bogotá, Colombia.
The initiative will coordinate and align with efforts under the Buildings Breakthrough (a global initiative to decarbonize the building sector and make clean technologies accessible and affordable by 2030) as well as the UNEP-hosted Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC) and its Subnational Stakeholders Action Group.
In addition to strengthening coordination between participating subnational jurisdictions and their national governments, the ZERB Accelerator will mobilize a broad coalition of organizations to provide implementation support. This will cover policy development and technical assistance; finance; data; and monitoring, review and verification.
The first organizations to announce that they will provide support as part of this coalition include Bloomberg Philanthropies; the Building to COP Coalition; C40 Cities (including the C40 Cities Finance Facility); the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC); the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM); the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL); the Under2 Coalition; the U.S. State Department; the World Green Building Council (WorldGBGC); and WRI.
WRI will lead coordination of the ZERB Accelerator, working in close partnership with other SCALE implementing partners: C40 Cities, Climate Group (Under2 Coalition), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the University of Maryland Center for Global Sustainability. SCALE is funded by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Energy and Bloomberg Philanthropies.