BY YANET FANTAYE WOGAYEHU / BAKU, AZERBAIJAN – The Subnational Climate Action Leaders’ Exchange (SCALE) partnership announced the launch of the Zero Emissions and Resilient Buildings (ZERB) Accelerator, a new initiative to rapidly reduce operational and embodied greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen climate resilience.
The new initiative aims to achieve its target in the buildings sector through enhanced multilevel collaboration with subnational governments around the world. The announcement was made at SCALE’s COP 29 Action Dialogue, where subnational leaders explored opportunities for strengthening climate action across key sectors. This is announced on Wednesday at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 29) in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The buildings sector is a major contributor to the climate crisis, with building operations and construction accounting for over a third of global carbon emissions. In addition to the urgent need for mitigation measures, it is essential to enhance resilience in the sector, which is vulnerable to numerous climate risks including flooding, rising sea levels, heat stress, heatwaves, severe storms, and fires.
Building on the success of the Lowering Organic Waste Methane (LOW-Methane) initiative launched by SCALE in 2023, the ZERB Accelerator will bring together a global cohort of leading cities, states, and regions committed to ambitious goals for mitigation and resilience in the buildings sector.
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 (Global ABC) 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 support for implementation in the areas of policy development and technical assistance; finance; and data and monitoring, review, and verification.
The first subnational jurisdictions to join the ZERB Accelerator include Maryland, U.S.; Washington, U.S.; and Bogotá, Colombia.
The first organizations to announce that they will provide support as part of the initiative 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 (WorldGBC); and the World Resources Institute.