Decarbonising the Built Environment

An international market-driven pathway for decarbonisation of the built environment

Our mission is to transform buildings for a net-zero carbon future.
We focus on buildings because they account for 40 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
We believe that this transformation must be market-driven, aimed at rewarding building owners and operators who make energy-saving upgrades to new and existing buildings. 

Reduce

Defining a realistic energy efficiency goal is the foundation for every CarbonIndex Accreditation. By holding buildings to a performance target, CarbonIndex allows building owners the flexibility to try innovative strategies that are designed to achieve optimal energy performance.

Certify

During design, the CarbonIndex Design will evaluate your building’s performance using Building Simulation. During operation the CarbonIndex Live will rely on live performance data using real time measurements. 

Trade

CarbonIndex turns your building’s carbon savings into quantifiable, tradable commodity. Carbon trading means allowing buildings to exchange carbon savings to meet a carbon reduction target. A trading system has two core elements: (i) a target or cap on emissions from buildings, and (ii) a new tradable commodity that represents the value of carbon savings.

credible

Digital, Measurable, Transparent, Assessing the entire building cycle from design to demolition

easy

Performance-based, Convenient, Flexible, Cost-effective

VALUE-ADDING

Market driven, Value-adding, Tradable Asset, Supply chain friendly

Reduce, Certify and Trade Carbon

The Carbon Index
Revolution

The Carbon Index (Ci) is an accreditation system that benchmarks and tracks operational energy use and carbon emissions in building projects. It is designed to be an accessible and affordable tool that can be applied to any building type, at any stage of the building’s lifecycle from design, remodelling to operation.

The Carbon Index is a revolutionary method of benchmarking and accreditation of building and infrastructure projects:

  • It is digital & performance-based
  • It builds carbon assets that can be traded using blockchain
  • It is developed by Dr Stellios Plainiotis, CEO of NEAPOLI and operated by the Zero Carbon Foundation, a non profit organisation 

Available for virtually all building types, the Carbon Index will provide a practical framework for highly efficient, and cost-saving high performance buildings to drive decarbonisation in the Built Environment.

Learn More

Performance-based Certification

There are several ways to determine the energy efficiency of a building project. Most Green Building Assessment methods look at the building’s structure and services (heating, cooling, insulation, etc.) and evaluate how it is designed in response to the behaviour of the “typical tenant”. This means that even if a really well-designed building is operated inefficiently, they will still receive high green building. To improve a Green Building score, the building owner or tenant must spend in upgrading each component to a certain level of performance.

The Carbon Index is a Performance-based scheme and uses a different approach: It analyses energy measurements to determine how much energy a building actually consumes. Instead of standardising or eliminating the tenant’s behaviour, the Carbon Index puts the occupant at the centre of the equation. This strategy gives potential buyers and tenants, as well as tenants, knowledge of how the building works.

The need for Carbon Index

Nearly 40% of world's energy-related greenhouse emissions are related to buildings. Yet the major challenges in decarbonising the Built Environment, remain the lack of effective reporting tools, upfront costs & long payback periods and “split incentives” among builders, owners, and tenants.
To scale up decarbonisation we urgently need to increase market demand and this requires clearly communicating measurable benefits. That makes performance-based benchmarking & accreditation a neccessity.
Carbon trading will provide market-driven incentive for the decarbonisation of the built environment. The Carbon Index is the first energy accreditation system that facilitates carbon trading.

Carbon Trading

Carbon trading is a market-based system aimed at reducing greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, particularly carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels. When applied to countries and power generation, it is not a novel idea, but it is revolutionary as a voluntary tool for enhancing building energy efficiency.

The Carbon Index intends to incentivise building projects to reduce and trade carbon emissions in order to meet their certification objectives. Buildings that may surpass their carbon savings objectives at a given time may sell their credits to buildings that are struggling to meet their targets, resulting in the same overall carbon savings. Whether the transaction occurs within the owner’s portfolio or between two individual building projects, it takes advantage of market dynamics and flexibility to find the most cost effective path to energy efficiency for individual buildings and thus the entire system.

Measurable and Digital

A trully performance-based energy benchmarking tool that does not interfere with the design process and does not dictate how your results should be achieved. It evaluates the building based on its actual performance. 

Contemporary

Embraces current technological advances such as Building Information Modelling, Cloud computing, Digital Twin, Internet of Things and Machine Learning.

Effective

As a Performance-Based tool, Ci elimimates incremental time and costs associated with complicated and bureocratic documentation.

VALUE-ADDING

By monitoring live performance Ci not only certifies your building but also provides meaningful insight that can be used to further improve performance by up to 20%. Also, by clearly communicating measurable energy improvements your project can improve its marketplace perfromance. 

Turns Carbon into Asset

Ci enables carbon trading hence turning Carbon savings into liquid and investable asset class that can be traded on the open market place.

Affordable

Finally, due to considerably less documentation involved, Carbon Index has 10 times lower registration costs compared to major international green building certification tools.