EeMAP Market Consultation: Over 500 Stakeholders Show Strong Support for Pilot Proposals

By Stephen Richardson, World Green Building Council

Between February and April of this year, the EeMAP consortium undertook a mammoth, market consultation exercise to gather detailed feedback on our draft proposals for the pilot scheme.

Spearheading this process, national Green Building Council’s (GBCs) from the Europe Regional Network (ERN) of World Green Building Council hosted eight workshops in Croatia, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK. The workshops brought together national experts from the energy efficiency, finance and valuation communities to discuss national implementation of the EeMAP pilot guidelines.

Using tools and materials provided by the ERN and engaging both national and international speakers, the GBC workshops attracted almost 500 stakeholders. In several instances, the workshops were co-hosted by national banks such as UniCredit in Italy and Triodos in Spain and have led to the formation of national hubs of actors from across the value chain who will take forward the implementation of the EeMAP pilot at national level. Alongside these workshops, the EMF-ECBC coordinated an online public consultation process which received more than 50 responses from a range of sectors.

The experts consulted in both the national workshops and the online consultation gave strong signals of support for the proposed approach to the EeMAP pilot. All respondents to the online consultation agreed that the draft guidelines were appropriate for the pilot scheme. There were no respondents who selected ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’.

In the workshops, a traffic-light system of red, amber and green responses was used to gather participants’ feedback on the proposed building performance criteria for energy efficient mortgages. Across all eight countries, the responses were either green, indicating the criteria can be implemented without any adaptation, or amber, indicating that only small adaptations would be needed. The map below shows a summary of the workshop responses.

Based on these outcomes, the EeMAP consortium have updated the guidelines for the pilot, making only small adjustments, and adding greater flexibility to ensure that they can be adapted to account for specific market conditions.

The large number of banks and supporting organisations [link to pilot launch press release] which have committed to the pilot is another endorsement that this framework has struck the right balance between ambition and rigour on the one hand and pragmatism and flexibility on the other.

Picture 1: Stephen Richardson of WorldGBC presents EeMAP to national experts at a workshop hosted be UKGBC in London

Picture 2: Hundreds of experts provided feedback on the EeMAP proposals during national workshops facilitated by Europe’s GBCs