Knowledge and Data Collaboration for Better Building Energy Performance Policies to Mitigate Climate Change

By New Global Knowledge Platform - www.gbpn.org
Spring 2013


The Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN) launched its brand new website on the 21st of February. This web-based tool is unique in that it has been designed as a global participative and open data knowledge hub harvesting, sharing and curating best practice policies in building energy performance globally. Behind this project lies the GBPN core philosophy: stimulating collective knowledge from experts worldwide to support better decision-making.

As buildings account for more than 30% of the global final energy use and energy-related carbon emissions, it is clear that this sector has the potential to play a crucial role in mitigating climate change. For this reason the GBPN's mission is to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. The GBPN research shows that by 2050, it is possible to reduce global building final energy use by one third of 2005 levels and works to change the focus of policy makers and building experts towards this goal.

Available in English and soon in Chinese, the new Knowledge Platform is at the cornerstone of the GBPN "deep path" strategy. It aims to support researchers & experts, policy-makers, building professionals, members of governmental institutions and multilateral organisations to gather around a common participatory tool and a common purpose: creating global best knowledge and data on building performance policies.

One of the main features is the Policy Comparative Tool enabling comparison of the world’s best practice policies for new buildings. By understanding how countries have designed and implemented best practice codes, policy makers can use this information to strengthen the future design of dynamic policies. The tool provides interactive data visualization and analytics.

The website also proposes a Report Database, a unique knowledge pyramid presenting all of our Reports in 10 different formats to address the information needs of different stakeholders (highlights, one page summary briefing to policy markers, infographics, technical reports and data series, etc).

The GBPN aims to facilitate new synergies with energy efficiency experts and building professionals worldwide. For this purpose, the new website offers a Laboratory, a participative research collaboration tool for building energy efficiency experts to share information and generate new knowledge on how best to develop ambitious building energy performance policies globally.

The GBPN encourages transparent availability and access to reliable data. As the energy performance of buildings becomes central to any effective strategy to mitigate climate change, policy-makers need more and better data to design, evaluate and compare policies and programmes. The GBPN data can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone - subject to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.

In addition, the GBPN Knowledge Platform has been developed under the Linked Open Data technology to connect with the best online resources. The GBPN Glossary is linked to DBpedia as well as the Reegle's Clean Energy and Climate Change Thesaurus developed by the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21). A "News Aggregator Tool" service is also available. And our platform connects to our Regional Hubs data portals: Buildingsdata.eu, the open data portal for energy efficiency in European buildings developed by the Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE), and Buildingrating.org, the leading online tool for sharing global best practices on building rating and disclosure policies launched by the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) in 2011.

The GBPN will be enriching its data over time with additional topics and information generated through data exchange projects and research partnerships and is inviting any interested organisations to suggest any opportunities for collaboration.