Publication

Improving Conditions for Green Building Construction in North America

Financing Models and Opportunities

Description

Among other factors, increasing uptake of green-building construction in North America requires access to financial capital, enabling policies, and a skilled workforce. As part of the report series “Improving Conditions for Green Building Construction in North America,” this report describes three financial mechanisms with strong potential for changing the green-building financing landscape in North America and recommends changes and supporting initiatives that may help overcome existing barriers to a more widespread adoption of those models.

The three models identified are: Pay-As-You-Save, Property Assessed Clean Energy, and Green Mortgages. For commercial retrofits in the United States and Canada, the report finds that leveraging private capital markets is critical, reducing transaction costs will improve participation, and negative perceptions about the benefit-to-cost ratio of green-retrofit financing can be overcome with information-sharing, awareness-raising, and education. Residential retrofits in Mexico will benefit from leveraging new sources of capital to scale up green retrofit investments and using a whole-house approach to measurement, verification, monitoring and reporting.

Additional Information