Climate Impacts of Housing

While housing is a big contributor to GHG-emissions, energy certificates or carbon footprints of apartments and houses are usually not easily obtainable. The purpose of the project was to help people who are buying a house or an apartment to assess their carbon footprint by developing a carbon calculator concept for property search engines

. When buying a house or a flat people should be able to consider the carbon footprint of the property, not only the dimensions of rooms and the usual estate agents spiel. This information was not obtainable via property search engines in Finland. Since housing is a big contributor to green house gas-emissions, especially in countries of cold winters, it requires more attention than it presently gets. This is what the Finnish Climate Advocates believed and, therefore, developed a carbon calculator for property search engines. One of the aims of this new service is to bring the compulsory energy classification of properties to a more prominent place in real estate advertisements. The team was able to sell their idea to Oikotie, one of the biggest property search engines in Finland. In October 2010 Oikotie added the CO2 calculator to their search engine. The carbon footprint is based on a property’s energy classification, size and installed heating method. Additionally, the tool can also be used to calculate the carbon footprint caused by commuting to work from different locations. The calculator was evaluated and verified by an external expert agency, Gaia Consulting.