Urgent acceleration on decarbonization strategies for resilient cities
This year’s Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) International Conference, themed “From the Ground Up: Tall Buildings and City-Making,” explored the complex interplay between urban form, social fabric and sustainability. Central to this dialogue was how climate resilience and decarbonization must be embedded in every layer of urban development.
In this blog, Marc Colella, AECOM Fellow, examines how digital innovation can help cities and portfolio owners accelerate their net-zero transition while safeguarding long-term value and livability.
What’s the urgency?
The built environment remains responsible for nearly 40 percent of global carbon emissions, making it both a major contributor to climate change and a crucial lever for mitigation. Although progress has been made — the sector’s carbon share has dropped from 39 to 37 percent in just five years, energy intensity is down 15 percent since 2010, and renewables now supply almost one-third of global electricity — the momentum remains uneven. High retrofit costs, regulatory complexity and rising investor expectations are placing pressure on portfolio owners to act decisively.
Key barriers to portfolio decarbonization
The pathway to portfolio decarbonization remains constrained by several persistent challenges, especially related to mobilizing technology. The four digital and systemic barriers that must be overcome to unlock large-scale transformation are:
- Data fragmentation – Asset-level carbon and energy data is often trapped in silos across diverse geographies, sectors and standards.
- Regulatory complexity – Over 40 national carbon regulations exist worldwide, each with distinct formats, verification processes and disclosure requirements that complicate cross-market alignment.
- Scope 3 tracking – Indirect emissions, often forming the majority of a portfolio’s carbon footprint, remain largely untracked or inconsistently measured.
- Technology infrastructure – Many organizations still rely on disconnected digital tools. Scaling a digital platform across markets with different cybersecurity and data laws is a significant undertaking.
Despite these challenges, the pace of digital evolution in the built environment offers reasons for optimism. Over the past decade, the industry has moved from static spreadsheets to predictive digital twins, and from manual compliance to AI-powered climate intelligence capable of optimizing investments in real time.
The next frontier is integration, which includes building scalable ecosystems that link data, technology and human insight. This approach allows for simulation, planning and action across entire portfolios, which then turns decarbonization from a fragmented exercise into a coordinated, data-driven strategy.
Portfolio Decarbonization Transformative Framework
To guide this transition, we’ve developed a Portfolio Decarbonization Transformative Framework, mapping five domains where digital transformation must occur simultaneously for decarbonization to reach its full potential. Each domain connects people, processes and technologies in one shared ecosystem, ensuring that every stakeholder from portfolio managers to facility operators can act on consistent, real-time insights.
The potential benefits are clear:
- 35 percent reduction in operational emissions.
- 40 percent higher return on investment (ROI) on capital works.
- 95 percent faster regulatory reporting.
The framework also underpins our pioneering work in Portfolio Carbon Capital Optimization, an approach that integrates financial and carbon intelligence to optimize investment decisions across complex asset portfolios.
Turning strategy into action: The role of digital twins
The Portfolio Carbon Capital Optimization Framework is a digital planning twin designed to optimize both carbon reduction and cost performance across entire asset portfolios. It unites a suite of analytical tools within a shared data ecosystem, enabling portfolio and facility managers to make coordinated, data-driven decisions. Using an optimization algorithm, it generates capital works programs that balance carbon reduction, cost efficiency, and compliance priorities.
By connecting users, tools and data across disciplines and systems through a centralized data lake, the platform delivers consistent, real-time insights across all assets, thus transforming strategy into actionable and financially defensible pathways toward net zero. Beyond portfolio management, it also serves as a model for how city-scale digital ecosystems can inform infrastructure planning, energy transitions and investment prioritization.
Advancing the decarbonization agenda
Accelerating decarbonization requires more than technology. It requires commitment, leadership and systems thinking. Resilient city-making is a collective endeavor, driven by the shared goal of achieving a net-zero, inclusive urban future.
So, what are some of the next steps the industry can take?
- Approach decarbonization as a portfolio-wide challenge, not an individual asset issue.
- Establish a digital framework that unifies data, personas and outcomes.
- Align capital programs with carbon optimization, prioritizing the execution of projects with the lowest returns to maximize overall impact.
- Adopt an open ecosystem approach — recognizing that no single technology or organization can deliver the full solution alone.
Our work alongside clients, governments and industry partners helps to turn climate goals into actionable pathways — helping shape cities that are not only decarbonized, but also equitable, connected and ready for the future.
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