Building renovation passports (BRPs) are essential tools to make buildings carbon-neutral. BRPs are documents which include a tailored roadmap with several steps. Each step suggests the necessary technical measures required to achieve a higher energy performance through renovation. Building renovation is essential to achieve Europe’s climate neutrality objectives and to enable the transformation towards a climate-neutral building stock.

Most existing buildings need to improve their energy performance and exchange fossil energy with renewable alternatives. BRPs are key tools to enable this transformation.

The decarbonisation of the built environment requires investments and efforts from a range of stakeholders including policymakers, the construction industry, and researchers. The European Commission has initiated incentives and targets for building renovation in several EU directives, including the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), the REPowerEU plan and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) Recast, as part of the Green Deal (2020) to achieve a carbon-neutral economy in 2050.
This guidebook is designed to help local authorities in the Renocally focus countries of Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia – and also in the wider Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region – to accelerate building decarbonisation.

As owners and managers of public offices, schools and medical facilities, local authorities will play a crucial role in transforming the building stock over the coming decades.

Many local authorities face serious challenges in terms of administration, funding and technical capacity. In smaller CEE public budgets in combination with the lingering consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent energy crisis, make renovations difficult. But despite these challenges, local authorities have an important opportunity and responsibility to lead by example in the construction sector transition by procuring responsibly and managing their buildings sustainably. This particularly applies to local authorities in CEE, where there are not always national BRP schemes or other support mechanisms available.

This guidebook highlights the legal provisions that are relevant for local authorities in the updated EU policy framework, and the potential benefits of BRPs for local authorities, based on practical examples. More specifically, the guidebook:

1. Presents BRP design features and success factors of BRP schemes based on European case studies and research projects.
2. Highlights relevant changes in key EU policies and initiatives for national and local authorities, specifically focusing on BRPs and provisions referring to local authorities or public buildings.
3. Provides recommendations for local authorities in Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and the wider region to start working with BRPs.

After the publication of the Renocally guidebook, the EPBD recast was published in the EU official journal on 08 May 2024.