The sociotechnical barriers to the decarbonization of buildings

Building decarbonization is critical for meeting long-term climate goals, given the embodied energy, material and resource flows involved in making buildings, operational energy use, and the need to both build new facilities to meet growing populations and to retrofit older, less efficient homes and businesses. In this review, the authors examine ninety-five sociotechnical barriers that inhibit progress on the decarbonization of the building sector that can be categorized by economic, political, social, behavioral, and technical dimensions. Economic barriers are the most prevalent globally, followed by political barriers. The building sector’s slowness in adopting strategies of decarbonization can be explained by the sector’s distinct complexity as demonstrated by differences among top barriers by building stage, stakeholders of interest, geography, and even the forum of discussion. Use of the “carbon lock-in” framework validates the intersectional nature of barriers to decarbonization of the building sector, and infers that interventions will need to be dynamic, local, and engaged with multiple themes simultaneously to make change.