Building design standards

The City of London Corporation is committed to ensuring that all future building work meets the highest commercially viable sustainability standards. We recognise that the choices we make in the design and construction of our buildings have climate impacts, even before the construction phase. Some materials emit more carbon than others. This is called 'embodied carbon'. To calculate a building's carbon footprint we are aiming to minimise emissions across the full lifecycle, from design onwards.

In order to achieve net zero by 2027 in our own operations and support reaching net zero by 2040 in the Square Mile, we need to reduce the need to retrofit buildings at a later date.

We will do this 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.