Planning Guides
Strategic decarbonization planning (SDP) is a comprehensive, often multi-year approach to retrofitting buildings to deeply reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It results in an investment roadmap that helps avoid missed opportunities, prevent stranded assets, and unlock long-term value.
This guide distills proven practices from the Empire Building Challenge and other leading retrofit efforts. It offers a flexible set of strategies that can be tailored to your building, team, and timeline—whether the work is led internally or supported by consultants.
In most large office and multifamily buildings, the elephant in the room is the heating system—particularly space and domestic hot water heating. These systems are the dominant source of Scope 1 emissions and a central challenge for decarbonization. Addressing them typically means replacing fossil fuel–burning equipment with electric systems, most often heat pumps.
Even with a grid still transitioning to renewables, the high efficiency of heat pumps leads to lower emissions—and that advantage will continue to grow. While first costs and electricity rates can present challenges, they can be addressed through careful planning, smart phasing, and strategic investment. This guide provides the best practices needed to meet those challenges and achieve deep, lasting emissions reductions and increased asset value.
Initiating a Strategic Decarbonization Planning project
Early decisions can make or break your decarbonization planning process. Set the stage for success by engaging stakeholders and clearly defining team roles, project scope, and goals. Getting alignment now avoids confusion—and costly detours—later.
Establish Clear, Aligned Goals
Most projects start with goals—but deep decarbonization requires more than broad intentions. Vague aspirations can lead to scope drift, delays, or missed opportunities. Instead, goals must be clearly defined, measurable, and aligned with the expectations of key decision-makers.
Each goal should include a specific metric and target. For example, instead of a general aim like “improve indoor air quality,” use quantifiable outcomes such as maintaining CO₂ levels below 1,000 ppm or keeping indoor relative humidity between 30–60%.
If you’re pursuing multiple goals—such as reducing emissions, improving resilience, and maintaining tenant comfort—identify potential synergies and trade-offs early. Recognizing where objectives reinforce or compete with one another helps guide better design and investment decisions.
Just as important: identify the actual decision-makers. Confirm they understand the goals, support them, and are committed to seeing them through. Early alignment at this level prevents costly missteps down the line.
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Engage Tenants
In leased buildings, tenant rents drive net operating income—and by extension, asset value. That makes tenant engagement a critical success factor for decarbonization efforts.
Bringing tenants to the table early ensures their priorities are considered when setting goals and defining scope. It helps uncover legitimate concerns, reveal operational constraints, and build trust. Early conversations also create the opportunity to discuss lease modifications—whether to enable cost recovery, set performance standards, or ensure future access for upgrades.
The result: a more workable, widely supported plan—built in partnership, not imposed in opposition.
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Choose the Right Analysis Tools
Strategic decarbonization planning can rely on tools ranging from simple spreadsheets to calibrated energy models. The right choice depends on your goals, project complexity, and the decisions the analysis needs to support.
Start with the end in mind: What outputs do decision-makers need? What measures are you evaluating? What level of precision is required? And what are your timeline, budget, and risk tolerance? Right-sizing the analysis ensures results are actionable—without wasting time on unnecessary complexity. Overanalyzing can burn resources, while underanalyzing risks poor decisions.
The Playbook highlights best practices that require capable tools. For example, your analysis may need to address:
- Interactive effects between upgrades
- Multi-year implementation planning
- Accurate equipment sizing for peak loads
- Demand management using time-of-day data
If you’re analyzing in-house, define tools and scope early to guide data collection and timelines. If using consultants, ensure your analysis goals and scope are clearly defined in the contract.
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