After years of inaction on climate change, the decade ahead has become the bracket in which humanity gets one last opportunity to at least contain the warming crisis. While mitigation efforts targeting transportation, industry and the energy sector remain mired in conflict, the world of buildings – responsible for about 40% of all carbon – offers vast and relatively uncontroversial opportunities to reduce emissions, create new jobs and produce more livable built environments. Here are five solutions that should be on every policy-maker’s radar.

1. Chop down embedded carbon in new builds

The latest generation of energy-efficiency regulations laid out in provincial building codes is aimed at decarbonizing the long-term operations of a building – heating systems, insulation and other measures to cut energy consumption. But given the critical importance of stabilizing global temperatures by 2030, Drew Adams, an associate at LGA Architectural Partners, says developers and regulators need to refocus their efforts on reducing the carbon embedded in building materials. Concrete, steel and plastic foam insulation together can account for 50 to 75% of a building’s total emissions in its first decade.

To get there, provincial building codes and municipal planning departments should require developers to produce life-cycle analyses as part of the permitting process, with the goal of using regulations and incentives to promote the use of low-carbon concrete, mass timber or mineral-based insulation, like Rockwool. California and Washington State are both experimenting with “buy clean” laws that require construction firms building public projects to use carbon-reduced construction materials.

While energy-efficiency measures such as solar panels and triple pane windows can be added to existing buildings to reduce emissions, a structure made out of concrete and steel will never reverse recoup the carbon used to make those materials. As Adams points out, it’s better to embed less carbon at the front end.

2. Get creative about retrofits

With ambitious new building codes in jurisdictions like British Columbia, the City of Vancouver and the City of Toronto, most new buildings will soon achieve or approach net-zero emissions. And climate-oriented reforms to the national building code, including new resilience standards to protect buildings from flooding, for example, are now in development.

The more intractable problem, says Scott Kennedy, a partner at Cornerstone Architecture in Vancouver, involves unlocking the financial incentive for homeowners and landlords to invest in energy retrofits.

The next generation of incentive programs, he says, should always begin with straightforward “building envelope” improvements: triple-pane windows, insulation, ventilation. But to go deeper, we’ll need to find ways to encourage Canadians to invest in more cutting-edge technologies. For example, to get homeowners to reduce natural gas consumption, there are now relatively affordable electric heat pumps, including one from a firm called Sanden. With a highly efficient compressor, it concentrates external ground heat and uses a carbon-dioxide-based refrigerant to rapidly transfer that energy to a hot water tank. “These are important products coming into the market place,” says Kennedy.

He also points to emerging approaches to commercial efficiency retrofits, such as “portfolio energy optimization.” The idea is to develop a business model around energy retrofits by aggregating savings across a larger portfolio of commercial buildings. Landlords get better-performing buildings, while the aggregator pockets energy savings created by the improved systems.

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