The Problem Was Never the Technology
Analysis · THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT'S CARBON PROBLEM · PART 3 OF 6
Part 2 ended on a real limit: some building emissions come out of chemistry, and no clean grid removes them. That's the exception, though. For most of what drives a building's footprint — how efficient it is, how it's heated, how it's powered — the fixes already exist and are on the market today: efficiency measures, electrification, on-site and grid renewables. As the research team behind the largest study of its kind put it, many of the tools needed to cut building emissions are already here.
So the question isn't what to build. It's why the sector keeps moving so slowly with tools it already has. In 2025, researchers at Boston University's Institute for Global Sustainability, working with Schneider Electric, ran a machine-learning review of thousands of studies and came back with 95 separate barriers to building decarbonization, published in Nature Communications. Very few of them are "the technology doesn't work."
The barriers are about money and rules
When they grouped the 95 barriers into themes, economic ones were the most common — high upfront costs, weak financing, uncertain returns, cost premiums on unconventional materials. Political barriers came second: missing or inconsistent building codes, uncertain governance, patchy enforcement. Technical barriers, the actual physical limits, were the least discussed of the five themes. Across 2022 to 2024, the top three barriers were high costs, high initial investment, and the price premium on green materials. Fifteen years of literature points the same way, with economic and political blockers on top the whole time.
And they land before anyone breaks ground
The same study mapped where in a building's life these barriers show up, and the answer is early. More than half appear before construction even starts — 30% at the standard-setting stage and 23% during design and planning. Another 19% surface in operation, 18% at end-of-life, and only 10% during material selection and construction itself.
That timing matters for owners. A building's carbon position is mostly set in the planning rooms — in the codes it's built to, the budget it's held to, the drawings it's approved on — by people making decisions long before anyone pours a foundation. By the time the work is visible on site, the important choices are already made.
Whoever pays isn't the one who benefits
Part of why those early decisions go the wrong way is a mismatch built into the deal structure. The person who pays for a low-carbon choice is rarely the person who collects the reward. The familiar version is a landlord who buys the efficient system while the tenant keeps the lower energy bill, so neither one has much reason to act. A 2024 ACEEE study showed this "split incentive" runs the full length of the value chain — developer to owner to operator to occupant.
Each party hands the building to the next. The developer builds and sells before any savings appear. The owner funds upgrades whose payoff flows to whoever occupies the space. The tenant gets the lower bills but won't reinvest in an asset they don't hold. The costs and the benefits sit in different columns, so the low-carbon option keeps losing on a narrow view of each party's own ledger.
Underneath it all: a fragmented industry
There's a structural reason these gaps never get closed. Construction is one of the least consolidated sectors in the economy. About 79% of construction firms have fewer than ten employees, and labour productivity has grown just 0.4% a year since 2000 — against 2% for the economy as a whole and 3% in manufacturing, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
A single project pulls together dozens of separate firms: developer, architect, structural and mechanical engineers, trades, lender, insurer, operator. Each optimizes its own slice and hands off to the next. When a sector is built that way, no one is positioned to make a decision across the whole thing — which is exactly what cutting embodied and operational carbon requires. That's how a problem with known solutions stays unsolved: the solutions exist, but the coordination to apply them doesn't.
What this means if you build or own
For an owner, this reframes the problem. Your building's carbon position isn't waiting on a breakthrough. It's the result of decisions already made — at code, at design, in the lease, in the budget — by separate parties, none of whom was responsible for the outcome as a whole. And once the building is up, most of it is locked in: embodied carbon is fixed at construction, and operational performance is expensive to change after the fact. With roughly 2.6 trillion square feet of new floor area expected worldwide between 2020 and 2060, today's uncoordinated decisions become tomorrow's committed emissions.
Which points to where the leverage actually is. The hard part isn't capability. It's connecting the money, the design, the regulation, and the operation into a single decision, instead of leaving them scattered across parties who never sit in the same room. Part 4 follows that thread to where it hits the balance sheet directly — financing, insurance, and asset value.
Sources
Nature Communications (2025) — Sociotechnical barriers to building decarbonization
Energy and Buildings (2025) — Fifty sociotechnical risks to building decarbonization
McKinsey Global Institute — Reinventing Construction: A Route to Higher Productivity
ACEEE (2024) — Expanded Split Incentives in Buildings' Value Chains
World Resources Institute — What to Know About Carbon Lock-in and How to Avoid It
UNEP — Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction 2025–2026