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Climate-friendly homes are not necessarily more expensive than their more polluting counterparts when accounting for a building's entire lifecycle, a by think tank BPIE and green-building certifier DGNB found. When assessing the residential buildings throughout their entire lifetime – meaning taking its construction, use-phase and end of life into account – the authors found no correlation between buildings in terms of their climate impact and construction costs.

Stakeholders in Germany's construction industry have in the past complained that stringent climate regulations in the buildings sector, especially tighter efficiency standards, make constructing new homes and offices much too expensive, leading construction orders to tumble.

"The fact that the independent study proves that this claim has no factual basis is good news," said Christine Lemaitre, managing director at DGNB. "It is absolutely possible to construct and operate buildings at low cost that cause low CO2 emissions and achieve a very good certification result."

The authors assessed the climate impact and costs of 28 DGNB-certified residential buildings and found that there was no clear correlation between the life cycle assessment values and the construction costs of the properties. Even the most climate-friendly buildings which achieved higher certification levels were not more expensive to construct. "The assumption that there is a fundamental link between low CO2 emissions during operation and higher construction costs was also not confirmed," the authors wrote. They recommended use-costs and environmental impacts to be considered early in the planning phase to optimise costs over the lifecycle.

For new buildings, construction materials and methods already account for around half of the emissions attributable to them, with the other half coming from heating and lighting during their use phase. Adopting more circular construction practices, as well as using climate-friendly materials thus has a huge leverage to lower buildings' environmental footprints.